Bug#1086770: vcmi: Very unstable package

[Alex Henry]

Package: vcmi
Version: 1.5.2+dfsg-2+b1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: tukkek at gmail.com

Dear maintainers,

I have played VCMI for about an hour yesterday and have run into numerous
crashes-to-desktop during basic, normal game-play. These include a reproducible
crash where pressing the space-bar during combat will crash-to-desktop with a
100% chance, every time.

The other crashes happened frequently too, every 10 or 20 minutes or so, also
usually after some input-action, suggesting a thorough lack of testing and
polish.

Considering every crash causes anywhere from 5 to 10 or more minutes of data
loss, I'll argue that this package is unusable for anyone but the most patient
of users who don't mind having 50% of their progress lost frequently while
playing a video-game past the 1.0 mile-stone (which won't be many).

I have played earlier versions of VCMI and it was not anywhere as unstable as
this and as such I'd recommend the maintainers block this package from reaching
stable. I have tried version 1.5.7 too from the project's official "stable" PPA
and also ran into a crash within minutes of launching the game.

I do apologize to the maintainers for not providing specific logs and detailed
reports of each individual bug but:

1. I have not collected every crash-log and it would be more time-consuming to
do so than I could do right now, considering the sheer number of crashes.
2. The individual issues are not the problem: I could continue playing, just by
avoiding pressing space during combat, for example. The problem is the overall
lack of stability in the entire package that renders this pretty much
unplayable, in my opinion, to the extent I feel the need to write this.

While I have not tested it recently, I do believe the 1.1 version in stable
does not suffer from this trouble-some lack of polish and I would suggest that
migration be blocked until at least 1.5.8 is released in the future and
properly tested. Consider making this a "serious" bug, if applicable.

My system is fairly up-to-date but I can't rule out some dependency issue. If
that's the case, this report still applies as dependencies would need to be up-
dated.

Big thanks to the Debian Games team for the continued work in making sure we
can game on the freest platform there is! Cheers.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.8.12-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages vcmi depends on:
ii  libavcodec61                    7:7.0.2-3
ii  libavformat61                   7:7.0.2-3
ii  libavutil59                     7:7.0.2-3
ii  libboost-chrono1.83.0t64        1.83.0-3.2
ii  libboost-filesystem1.83.0       1.83.0-3.2
ii  libboost-locale1.83.0           1.83.0-3.2
ii  libboost-program-options1.83.0  1.83.0-3.2
ii  libboost-thread1.83.0           1.83.0-3.2
ii  libc6                           2.40-3
ii  libfuzzylite6.0                 6.0+dfsg-8
ii  libgcc-s1                       14.2.0-6
ii  libminizip1t64                  1:1.3.dfsg+really1.3.1-1
ii  libqt5core5t64                  5.15.13+dfsg-2
ii  libqt5gui5t64                   5.15.13+dfsg-2
ii  libqt5network5t64               5.15.13+dfsg-2
ii  libqt5widgets5t64               5.15.13+dfsg-2
ii  libsdl2-2.0-0                   2.30.8+dfsg-1
ii  libsdl2-image-2.0-0             2.8.2+dfsg-1+b1
ii  libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0             2.8.0+dfsg-1+b2
ii  libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0               2.22.0+dfsg-1
ii  libstdc++6                      14.2.0-6
ii  libswscale8                     7:7.0.2-3
ii  libtbb12                        2021.11.0-2
ii  zlib1g                          1:1.3.dfsg+really1.3.1-1

Versions of packages vcmi recommends:
ii  ffmpeg       7:7.0.2-3
ii  innoextract  1.9-0.1+b1
ii  unshield     1.5.1-1+b2
ii  unzip        6.0-28

Versions of packages vcmi suggests:
pn  homm3-demo-data | homm3-data  <none>

-- no debconf information