Re: OpenAL and freealut

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de>]

( CC:'ing debian-devel as a heads-up for a new transition. )

Ok, this is a status update for openal/freealut and a question for
advice.

OpenAL Upstream has decided to introduce proper library versioning and
will start with an SONAME of libopenal.so.1 in their next upstream
release. 

Currently, we ship an quite old version of openal. This old version has
freealut 'built-in'. The current stable release (version 0.0.8) has
freealut split in a seperate package, called 'freealut'. Thierry has
prepared a 'freealut' package in our svn, which provides libfreealut0.
Unfortunately, they kept the old SONAME of libopenal.so.0. 

I prepared a new version of openal providing a binary package
libopenal0a, which Replaces the old libopenal0 package, but installs a
file libopenal.so.0.0.8 with SONAME libopenal.so.0. This is to ensure
that all reverse dependencies get rebuilt against openal 0.0.8. On the
next upstream release, the SONAME will get bumped to libopenal.so.1, so
we will have another transition.

I propose that we start the libopenal0a transition by uploading both
freealut and libopenal0a to unstable, because there are rather few
reverse dependencies. Most of them (if not all) should be just rebuilt.
If they use the freealut api, they need an additional "-lfreealut" in
their LDFLAGS.

If you think that this is too aggressive, we can also first upload both
packages to experimental, asking all package maintainers to provide
transitioned package to experimental as well. I'd rather like to avoid
this because I fear that this could delay the transition.

Below a list of affected package along with their maintainers:

Marc Dequènes (Duck) <Duck@DuckCorp.org>
   pyopenal

Loic Dachary (OuoU) <loic@debian.org>
   openalpp-cvs
   osgal-cvs

Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca>
   xpilot-ng

Christian Bayle <bayle@debian.org>
   crystalspace

Bartosz Fenski <fenio@debian.org>
   scorched3d

Mike Furr <mfurr@debian.org>
   chromium
   vegastrike

Rudy Godoy <rudy@kernel-panik.org>
   torcs

Ove Kaaven <ovek@arcticnet.no>
   flightgear

Debian Games Team <pkg-games-devel@lists.debian.org>
   boson-base

Ari Pollak <ari@debian.org>
   rss-glx

Steve M. Robbins <smr@debian.org>
   coin2

regards,
	Reinhard