Bug#874727: OSG changing VRML renderer away from coin3

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

2018-11-04 18:28 Christoph Berg:
>Re: To markus 2018-10-05 <20181005080326.GB13732 at msg.df7cb.de>
>> > it's a packaging bug - libcoin is statically linked with libexpat, and
>> > the version being used is outdated. So anything that uses libcoin and
>> > libexpat will run into a segfault.
>> >
>> > I am not aware of any other application that uses libcoin.
>>
>> I noticed because PostGIS is affected via postgis B-D -> libsfcgal-dev
>> -> libsfcgal-osg1 -> libopenscenegraph100v5 -> libcoin80v5. Looking at
>> https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/autoremovals.cgi there's quite a few
>> packages depending on coin3. So the question whether this affects
>> freecad only or more packages is making quite a difference.
>
>There is some indirect progress on this, Sebastiaan Couwenberg has
>submitted patches to change OSG's VRML renderer to SGI Inventor:
>
>| Patches for both OSG packages have been submitted to use SGI Inventor
>| instead of COIN:
>|
>|  https://bugs.debian.org/912866 (openscenegraph)
>|  https://bugs.debian.org/912867 (openscenegraph-3.4)

I am not totally opposed to that, and thanks to Bas for the patches.
But it looks to me that the proper solution is something like what
Bernhard posted just minutes before this message that I am replying to
(that perhaps Christoph didn't notice, due to the timing):

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=874727#96


I think that it's a better/proper solution because:

a) SGI inventor looks like not having new upstream releases for more
   than a decade (or them not packaged in Debian), thus presumably not a
   terribly good idea in general to keep packages depending on it

b) Fixing a problem with crashes and embedded static expat library in
   Coin looks like the right thing to do anyway


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