Source: directfb Severity: serious Justification: ensure visibility for potential adopters X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-...@lists.debian.org, debian-qa@lists.debian.org User: debian-qa@lists.debian.org Usertags: directfb
directfb has been unmaintained in Debian since 2018, and its web pages directfb.org and directfb.net seem to have been domain-squatted. In practice, DirectFB targeted highly resource-constrained embedded systems, most of which are likely to be no longer relevant: much of the embedded market has been eaten by Android, and outside the Android world the replacement for directfb is typically to use X11, Wayland or maybe KMSDRM, which have an acceptable footprint on modern hardware and make better use of discrete or integrated GPUs. There are maintained(?) forks of DirectFB at https://github.com/deniskropp/DirectFB and https://directfb2.github.io/ (possibly others) but as far as I'm aware, nobody is packaging those. Typical graphical toolkits like GTK and SDL have generally been removing DirectFB support: it was present (but did not necessarily work well) in GTK 2 and SDL 2, and available as a third-party plugin for Qt 4 and 5, but seems to have been removed from GTK 3, SDL 3 and Qt 6. Older versions of the graphical debian-installer used GTK 2 on DirectFB, but current versions use GTK on X11. If nobody is intending to take over maintenance of directfb, is it time to remove it from Debian? When I've received a bug number for this bug, I'll block it by bugs against the remaining reverse-dependencies: baresip directvnc gst-plugins-bad1.0 links2 xine-lib-1.2 I'm cc'ing debian-arm since that seems like the platform where DirectFB is most likely to be relevant. smcv
