Bug#1036708: ITS: dosbox is dead, move to active, high quality dosbox-staging successor

[David Heidelberg]

Package: dosbox
Version: 0.74-3-4+b1
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: sk...@debian.org

Dear Maintainer,

DOSBox upstream is dead for a long time. Since upstream is dead,
multiple good or worse quality forks emerged over the time.

One of serious ones is DOSBox-staging, which implemented testing, using
recent SDL 2, modern programming language and tries hard to solve issues
previously carried patch by patch from downstream forks.

I (and probably few others listed in [1]) would love to see working
DOSBox.

Current DOSBox due to usage of SDL 1.2 is hardly usable on Wayland based
environments, so my main motivation is use DOSBox on Wayland and
Mobian/PureOS (Debian adapted to mobile phones).

Thank you!

[1] https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/664


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.0
APT prefers unstable-debug
APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing'), (10, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-9-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 dosbox depends on:
ii libasound2 1.2.8-1+b1
ii libc6 2.36-9
ii libgcc-s1 12.2.0-14
ii libgl1 1.6.0-1
ii libpng16-16 1.6.39-2
ii libsdl-net1.2 1.2.8-6+b1
ii libsdl-sound1.2 1.0.3-9+b2
ii libsdl1.2debian 1.2.15+dfsg2-8
ii libstdc++6 12.2.0-14
ii libx11-6 2:1.8.4-2
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.13.dfsg-1

dosbox recommends no packages.

dosbox suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information

[Stephen Kitt]

Hi,

On Wed, 24 May 2023 16:43:56 +0200, David Heidelberg <da...@ixit.cz> wrote:
> DOSBox upstream is dead for a long time. Since upstream is dead,
> multiple good or worse quality forks emerged over the time.
>
> One of serious ones is DOSBox-staging, which implemented testing, using
> recent SDL 2, modern programming language and tries hard to solve issues
> previously carried patch by patch from downstream forks.
>
> I (and probably few others listed in [1]) would love to see working
> DOSBox.
>
> Current DOSBox due to usage of SDL 1.2 is hardly usable on Wayland based
> environments, so my main motivation is use DOSBox on Wayland and
> Mobian/PureOS (Debian adapted to mobile phones).

DOSBox-X is in NEW:
https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/dosbox-x_2023.05.01%2Bdfsg-1.html

You have an existing ITP for dosbox-staging, https://bugs.debian.org/973822.
Are you still working on that?

It’s not clear to me why you want to salvage the dosbox package, could you
clarify?

Regards,

Stephen

[David Heidelberg]

Hi!

I had no idea DOSBox-x exist.

Anyway, we had currently only `dosbox` package which working very poorly
on mobile devices.

My intent is fix that by replacing DOSBox with better quality codebase.

Feel free to close then.

David

--
David Heidelberg
Consultant Software Engineer