[Slackbuilds-users] warzone2100, qt5, gpredict and chromium-bsu are on a boat...

[Arnaud]

Hi everybody !

Summary of this message is this :
 - I'm unilaterally taking over maintainership of warzone2100, if that's ok ;
 - I may take over gpredict if nobody wants it ;
 - qt5 has pcre2 as optional dependency, but it's not listed in README ;
 - unixodbc is listed as an SBo qt5 optional dependency, but it's not available
on SBo (there's a line in the README for unavailable optional dependencies) ;
 - we may mark GLee, quesoglc, tuxkart and lightyears as unmaintained, while not
removing them because they are actually up-to-date ;
 - REQUIRES and README for chromium-bsu could be changed, please refer to the
last part of this long mail.

And now for the explanations...


	I recently looked at warzone2100 and saw it was quite out of date (about
5 years). A simple version bump from 3.1.2 to 3.2.3 (the latest release) worked
fine on my computer.
	So I looked into its maintainer, David Fillpot <mfillpot at gmail.com>,
who is inactive on SBo since 2013.
He was maintainer of 6 packages, of which at least 4 are abandoned projects
(GLee, quesoglc, tuxkart (fork to supertuxkart) and lightyears).
	The remaining 2 are gpredict (hugely out of date, SBo version is 1.3,
and the latest is 2.2.1), and Warzone 2100.

	So, I don't think it's really needed to contact him, and I'd like to
take over warzone2100. I could take over gpredict too if nobody else wants it,
but I haven't done any work to that effect for now.

	Next step was to find out if anything changed with warzone2100, and it
did, dependencies aren't the same, quesoglc is not used anymore, GLee neither
(it was an optional dependency), instead SDL2 and qt5 are required.

	But looking to build it on a clean environment, I then discovered that
my qt5 package (built on a non-clean environment, but I dreaded building it
again on the clean environment because of the time it takes) is linked against
pcre2, which isn't listed anywhere in required or optional dependencies.
	And looking at optional dependencies of qt5, I discovered that unixodbc
is listed as available on SBo (there's a section for optional dependencies *not*
available on SBo), which doesn't seem to be true.

	Next step was to look if the abandoned packages were used anywhere.
It concerns only GLee and quesoglc. The only use of GLee was as optional
dependency of warzone2100, and it is not used anymore. Though quesoglc is used
by chromium-bsu.

	Hence I looked into chromium-bsu !
- It is up-to-date, 0.9.16.1 is the latest release.
- It requires only one of ftgl and quesoglc, but uses quesoglc if both are
present.
- It will use SDL2_image, SDL_image or libglpng, in that order. As
SDL_image is part of Slackware, it'll never use libglpng, hence it is not a
required dependency. Except if SDL2 is installed but not SDL2_image, then it
won't use SDL_image, and therefore expect libglpng to be there.
- It will use freealut(OpenAL), SDL2_mixer or SDL_mixer, in that order. And
actually, even when using SDL2, it builds against SDL2 and SDL_mixer (not
SDL2_mixer), if neither freealut nor SDL2_mixer are available, which seems
ugly, but actually runs.
	So, this is a bit of a dependency mess.
Hence I have a proposition that takes into account that SDL2, SDL2_image and
SDL2_mixer will be part of Slackware 15.
REQUIRES="quesoglc"
README:
Optional dependencies:
 * SDL2, in which case one of SDL2_image or libglpng is required ;
 * ftgl can be used as replacement for quesoglc ;
 * freealut or SDL2_mixer
It is to be noted that with the upcoming Slackware 15, which includes SDL2,
SDL2_mixer, SDL2_image, the REQUIRES="quesoglc" is still ok, and the README only
needs to stipulate freealut as optional dependency without any other
information required, and ftgl as possible replacement for quesoglc.

	Conclusion being quesoglc is actually used in one other package,
contrary to GLee which isn't used anywhere and whose webpage is completely
broken.

And, well, that seems to be all for today folks, thanks for reading me ^^

-- 
Arnaud <yth at ythogtha.org>