08.01.2024 00:53, Thorsten Glaser :
Michael Tokarev dixit:
Gosh. Are you serious or is this some sort of a joke (it's not 1st April yet).
I’m serious.
This change has been made in version 1:2.12+dfsg-2 (Apr-2018), there's
a news item about it. This same news item explains the reason and how
to deal with it.
Hmh, NEWS items are not shown when doing a fresh install on bullseye.
And even then, searching for SDL case-insensitively in that file does
not even show it.
...
I see. You're coming from even older, pre-historic time than I thought :)
Long time ago qemu-system had SDL UI as the only available local guest UI.
Later on that one has been basically replaced with GTK - SDL were
difficult to maintain and it didn't support most new things. But later
on, in parallel to GTK, SDL2 UI has been introduced. That one hasn't
been enabled in debian qemu for quite some time, because people complained
about too much extra dependencies already for a headless install (qemu
already pulled in lots of X11 stuff). Only after it has become possible
to split whole UI display support into a separate package, so that main
qemu-system does not depend on any graphics library, I enabled SDL2
display - now in *parallel* with GTK, and with GTK being the default
(since this one is much more complete and has less bugs than SDL2).
Sure you can request -display sdl explicitly, maybe only if there's
some bug in gtk display and you want to check if it works better with
sdl, - but qemu always had good default from the available options.
All this is history still, for a few debian releases it is not relevant
already. For a new install, qemu-system-foo Recommends qemu-system-gui
package for a reason. If you disable installing recommends, you're
supposed to at least check which packages it recommends before saying
some feature is missing, - maybe it's in some recommends. You're the
*first* person to complain about this since the split! :)
BTW, in the current package in sid, I refined an old change (don't
remember if it already was in bullseye or not) which suggests to
install an additional package if a requested display is known but
not available, like this:
$ qemu-system-x86_64 -display sdl
qemu-system-x86_64: Display 'sdl' is not available. Perhaps you want to
install qemu-system-gui package?
(for a few places, not just for display - or else it was spewing
some errors due to missing other modules). Bullseye is definitely
too old to add such changes though.
/mjt
