[Pkg-gnome-extras-maintainers] Bug#1145050: gimp: Crashes on startup: "Failed loading SDL3 library" then segfault

[Simon McVittie]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo unreproducible
Control: severity -1 important

On Tue, 22 Sep 2026 at 09:33:40 -0400, James Van Zandt wrote:
>I note that ldd lists 124 library dependencies for gimp, but none is an sdl
>library.  Likewise for `gimp -v`. So how can we tell what version library it
>needs?

Unfortunately, in general you can't, because gimp has a plugin 
architecture, so it also needs all the libraries that are required by 
all of its plugins.

>Failed loading SDL3 library.

According to https://codesearch.debian.net/ this message comes from 
sdl2-compat, which is the implementation of libSDL2-2.0.so.0 
(libsdl2-2.0-0) in Debian testing/unstable. Presumably some plugin pulls 
that in, most likely via libgegl-0.4-0t64, which has plugins named 
sdl2-display.so and sdl3-display.so.

But, libsdl2-2.0-0 depends on libsdl3-0, so it should be able to load 
that library successfully - and indeed you previously said that you do 
already have libsdl3-0 installed, at a suitable version.

I can't reproduce this crash: gimp loads successfully for me, and 
/proc/$(pgrep gimp)/maps shows that it has loaded both libSDL2-2.0.so.0 
(libsdl2-2.0-0) and libSDL3.so.0 (libsdl3-0).

What version of libsdl2-2.0-0 do you have installed? Ideally run

     dpkg-query -W|grep libsdl

which would list all SDL-related libraries.

Are there any libraries in /usr/local/lib or some other non-dpkg-managed 
location?

Running

     LD_DEBUG=libs gimp 2>&1 | tee 1145050.log

would likely provide useful information in 1145050.log (it will be 
very verbose for an application as complex as gimp).

     smcv