https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1884608 Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Flags|needinfo?(hdegoede@redhat.c | |om) | --- Comment #33 from Hans de Goede <hdegoede@xxxxxxxxxx> --- (In reply to krcroft from comment #32) > The DOSBox Staging fork sits downstream from the DOSBox project, and > therefore is my expectation that "installing DOSBox" using the packaging > system should install the bona fide DOSBox project, plain and simple. I understand, the problem is that as a distribution we also have to make sure that when users install a package such as dosbox it actually works; and the "bona fide DOSBox project" no longer works very well under Linux. Fedora Workstation (which the typical dosbox Fedora user will use) defaults to using Wayland and the original dosbox does not work properly under Wayland, keyboard re-binding is broken and the cursor keys are broken too. Also the old dosbox is using SDL1 (IIRC even a patched version of SDL1) and we are phasing out SDL1 because it is not being maintained upstream anymore and it has issues under Wayland with e.g. grabbing the keyboard while going fullscreen causing SDL1 apps to sometimes not have any keyboard input at all. Dosbox 0.74 was released more then 10 years ago! Since then there have been a few tiny bugfix releases to address the most severe issues and otherwise AFAICT there has been very little development. AFAICT various community members have tried to help out, e.g. there have been multiple attempts to do a SDL2 port, but last time I checked (which was a while ago) the "DOSBox Development Team" has consistently refused to merge SDL2 support / switch to SDL2. I don't know what the current state of the code in svn is, but we really do not want to have to package snapshots doing timely releases is important for us as a distro / downstream consumer and dosbox is severely failing in that department. There are a lot of forks and it seems that all the activity is happening there. I've seen this pattern with other FOSS projects and I believe that the main reason for this is because the original dosbox project has become stale / almost frozen in time for some reason. Along those lines is both the refusal to switch to SDL2 as well as the refusal to switch to git. Dosbox seems to not only function as a time-capsule allowing to enjoy old dos games (which is great). It unfortunately seems to have become frozen in time itself as well. I also want to make it very clear that there is no conspiracy to discredit the original dosbox project or anything going on here. We are just trying to make sure that we give our end-users the best possible experience (or at a minimum a working experience). IMHO at this moment the original dosbox does very much NOT offer the best experience, it does not even offer a fully working experience anymore. Equally important is to note that making dosbox-staging replace the orginal dosbox, instead of having the 2 parallel installable was NOT Patryk Obara's idea. This was my idea (see comment 17 under the TODO/FIXME heading) and was pushed forward by me. Basically the story goes like this: 1. Fedora Workstation defaults to Wayland 2. I wanted to play a good old dos game with my children during the last Christmas holidays 3. cursor keys don't work 4. I blame dosbox because the lack of releases / keeping up with a changing software environment shows and dosbox seems to have gotten worse over time 5. I look at forks, find that dosbox-staging is trying to stay close to the original, with no crazy features like win95 support, while adding useful features like SDL2 support. 6. I package dosbox-staging, since I don't like running "make install" on my system 7. I was planning on submitting my package as an official Fedora package and then I noticed that this package submission from Patryk was already underway, so I started reviewing this and I suggested replacing the Conflicts which the spec file had with an Obsoletes + Provides (see comment 17 under the TODO/FIXME heading) ### Note with all that said, if people really want to have the original dosbox packaged for Fedora too, that can happen but first the technical issues which I mentioned at the top of this comment need to be addressed. So this means that someone would need to step up to do the following: 1. Makes sure that the original dosbox works with sdl12-compat, see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SDL12onSDL2 2. Fixes the keybinding issues it has while running under Wayland 3. Commits to maintain the package in Fedora and to ensure that things don't regress (again) Note that 1. + 2. here ideally should be merged back in the original upstream dosbox project, following by the upstream dosbox project doing a new release with the fixes for this in. But we can also carry any patches for 1. + 2. as downstream patches. The most important thing to get the original dosbox back in Fedora is for someone to step up and do the necessary work for this, as well as committing to doing future maintenance. Getting the original dosbox back into Fedora will probably also involve moving to the Alternatives: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Alternatives/ mechanism for /usr/bin/dosbox but that is fine. And this will also require some changes to the current dosbox-staging package, but that again is fine. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are always notified about changes to this product and component You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ package-review mailing list -- package-review@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to package-review-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-review@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
