Bug#788540: libsdl2: fails to cross compile on mingw (attach solution)

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

2015-06-12 15:50 a_normal_user:
>Source: libsdl2
>Severity: normal
>
>Dear Maintainer,
>
>
>An error occured when use mingw to compile libsdl2.
>
>
>For example,
>
>execute:
>$ ./configure --host="i686-w64-mingw32" && make
>
>will get an error:
>>  src/video/windows/SDL_windowsvideo.c:250:18: fatal error: DXGI.h: No such file or directory
>>  #include <DXGI.h>
>
>
>Here is the solution,
>https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2440

I was hoping (and waiting for many months, or year+ now) that 2.0.4 was
released at some point, so we can package a "known milestone", and so we
don't have to cherry pick fixes like this that people request us from
time to time.

Because of this cherry-picking, in the past the Debian packages caused
subtle ABI changes or behaviours that people depended upon and diverged
from the same versions in the rest of the distributions, or wrong
patches that entered in Debian stable releases and later were reverted
without us noticing for some time and without being able to drop them in
the stable releases...

So now we try to be more cautious and to avoid cherry-picking fixes
(unless they are critical fixes), unless they were going to be released
imminently, but we don't have this guarantee anymore.  Upstream did not
release a simple 2.0.4 bugfix release (or anything else) in more than 19
months, while lots and lots of changes pile up every month without any
clear indication of what's considered to be stable and what is not.

We already tried to encourage upstream in different ways to try to get
regular bugfix releases, but we failed so far.  If you think that you
can influence them, please go ahead :)


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