[RFC PATCH 0/5] XAudio PE conversion.

[Giovanni Mascellani]

Hi,

Il 23/06/21 19:15, Zebediah Figura (she/her) ha scritto:
> We're not the only user of PE libraries, or Debian wouldn't already be 
> shipping some. See [1] for example.
> 
> More to the point, all I'm really trying to advocate for is *asking 
> first*. I don't necessarily claim that distributions *want* to ship 
> mingw dependencies, but we haven't asked them, and in the case that they 
> *do* want to—which seems more than plausible to me—we should work with 
> them rather than doing everything ourselves. The point is, nobody's 
> asked yet.

I believe the only reason Debian is shipping a few MinGW-compiled 
libraries is to have win32-loader[1], which is compiled as a standard 
Debian package. It is a very fringe application and I doubt many people 
would notice if it disappeared. I guess it is there mainly because 
someone thought it was a cool idea at some point and nobody has yet 
thought that it is too of a burden to maintain; and yes, sometimes it 
can be useful for users. But, relevantly to our discussion, I don't 
think there is in Debian any intent to maintain a set of MinGW-compiled 
packages for general use, not to speak of available contributor time 
(Wine itself is stuck to 5.0 in Debian, because unfortunately nobody has 
find the time to get it updated since then).

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32-loader

So, I don't think that there is any value, at this point, in sharing PE 
libraries with other software, from the point of view of Debian.

What instead I think Debian (and Debian users) would much prefer is to 
avoid downloading binaries compiled from somewhere else than Debian 
build servers, like it happens now for gecko and mono. I don't know what 
are the reasons behind that choice, but I personally dislike it both as 
a user (because when I download packages from my distribution I expect 
to have stuff working without having to download other code from other 
places; downloading executable code requires trusting your peer, and one 
of the reasons of using a distribution is to put your trust in them and 
not having to question it again for any program you run) and as a 
developer (because I have to interact at runtime with my program to have 
it running the code I'm working on). I would really like to avoid adding 
FAudio to this dreaded list.

My two cents, Giovanni.