Bug#809070: Fwd: libsdl1.2 unicode bug causing random lockups (sdl bug #2325)

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi Ozkan,

2015-12-26 22:46 To Debian Bug Tracking System:
>Package: libsdl1.2
>Version: 1.2.15-12
>Forwarded: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2325
>Control: submitter -1 sezeroz at gmail.com
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Ozkan Sezer <sezeroz at gmail.com>
>Date: 2015-11-18 6:01 GMT+00:00
>Subject: libsdl1.2 unicode bug causing random lockups (sdl bug #2325)
>To: pkg-sdl-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org
>
>
>This is SDL bug 2325: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2325
>Also see Fedora bug 1126136: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1126136
>
>In short, certain SDL_EnableUNICODE() usage in apps/games can drop some
>keyboard events and result in lockups.
>
>One of the affected games is hexen2 (uhexen2.sf.net) which I am the
>mainstream maintainer, and one of my users reported that he ran into
>this bug in ubuntu:
>http://sf.net/p/uhexen2/discussion/425207/thread/6f168cfb/?limit=25&page=1#ecde
>
>I am not using debian or ubuntu, so I don't know how to report this
>the right way, so I am sending this as an email to libsdl debian
>maintainers.

I performed the necessary incantations now, I suppose that you have
received notifications about it, but if not, here it is:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=809070

You can add information to the report simply by sending e-mail to:

  809070 at bugs.debian.org


>SDL upstream already has fixed the bug, so it would be nice to see it
>fixed in the debian/ubuntu/etc realm.

I am not sure if they plan to release anything in the 1.2 branch, they
declared it obsolete years ago when they released v2 and they haven't
released in almost four years by now, the latest one was:

  2012-01-21    release-1.2.15

Any plans for porting Hexen2 to SDLv2, by the way?


I realise that it's an annoying problem and Hexen2 a popular
application, and the patch doesn't seem very intrusive, but in general
we are always wary of backporting unreleased patches, even if in this
case it was acknowledged by upstream (but not released).

The reason is that sometimes when we did this in the past, changes that
fixed legit bugs caused problems for applications that worked around
problems in a different way, or had strange interactions due to other
previous changes that were not backported along with the one at hand.
There are almost 400 packages in Debian depending on this one, including
very high-profile ones like VLC and Qemu, so changes are always risky.

It also happened to us that we backported changes that were acked and
commited to upstream's VCS but not released, then went into our stable
releases, but later were reverted by upstream after finding faults with
more testing -- so people using Debian/Ubuntu had these problematic
changes for years, that shouldn't have been realeased.

In short, the most sure way to get the changes applied to Debian and
derivatives is to make sure than the changes are released by upstream --
SDL packages in Debian go out fairly soon after upstream releases
(unless we are in freeze before releases, or the changes upstream are
not relevant for Debian/Linux).


Cheers.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>