Bug#1067512: libglfw3-wayland is practically not installable

[James Cowgill]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

Hi Michel,

On 22/03/2024 19:34, Michel Le Bihan wrote:
> Package: libglfw3-wayland
> Version: 3.3.10-1
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I noticed that libglfw3-wayland conflicts with libglfw3. That makes perfect sense since both packages provide the same .so files. However, most packages in Debian depend only on libglfw3. Take pink-pony as an example. It's not possible to have both pink-pony and libglfw3-wayland installed on the same system.

Yes this is the way the packaging is designed and it's intentional. You
can read the reasons I gave many moons ago here:
https://bugs.debian.org/827125

But it boils down to the fact that glfw exports some X11 symbols and if
your application uses some of these functions then it would crash if you
switched to the wayland library. At the time I didn't try working out
another solution and just made both packages conflict with each other.

> I think that either libglfw3 should be a virtual package that depends on libglfw3-wayland or libglfw3-x11 or that libglfw3
> should have both backends enabled.

Now that glfw 3.4 has runtime backend selection, yes we should be able
to fix this fairly easily by turning both backends on at the same time
when we update to 3.4. This isn't an option in 3.3 though.

James