#1043484 libplib1: sound library only supports OSS

Package:
libplib1
Source:
libplib1
Description:
Portability Libraries: Run-time package
Submitter:
michel
Date:
2025-06-25 20:43:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1043484#5
Date:
2023-08-11 23:32:07 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,



Debian is maintaining this right? Upsteam seams dead.

I recently compiled tuxkart (uses libplib), not supertuxkart, tuxkart. It is the ancestor of supertuxkart.

I was amazed to find out that it actually worked O_O (2006) . The only problem, is that it compiled with OSS support. And it's a version that is not compatible with the simple OSS emulations that just load a library, but require full OSS emulation with a fake /dev/dsp. Trying to emulate that is especially inefficient and buggy.

the problem is in the SL library inside libplib. It would require to be updated with pulseaudio.
Asuming this is not a wontfix.

#1043484#10
Date:
2024-12-07 01:31:35 UTC
From:
To:
Upstream is sadly dead. Steve Baker (upstream dev) has abandoned PLib
completely <https://sourceforge.net/p/plib/bugs/55/#88e9>.

I am working on a project to bring back TuxKart on newer Debian
machines, and I also came across this issue.

It seems that the PLib git repo (on Salsa) is not really being updated
much, besides for some patches.

alsa-oss and other OSS emulators don't work, so it would be nice to have
an ALSA patch on PLib.


On Sat, 12 Aug 2023 01:32:07 +0200 michel <okgomdjgbmoij@gmail.com> wrote:

 > Package: libplib1
 > Version: 1.8.5-14+b1
 > Severity: normal
 > X-Debbugs-Cc: okgomdjgbmoij@gmail.com
 >
 > Dear Maintainer,
 >
 >
 >
 > Debian is maintaining this right? Upsteam seams dead.
 >
 > I recently compiled tuxkart (uses libplib), not supertuxkart,
tuxkart. It is the ancestor of supertuxkart.
 >
 > I was amazed to find out that it actually worked O_O (2006) . The
only problem, is that it compiled with OSS support. And it's a version
that is not compatible with the simple OSS emulations that just load a
library, but require full OSS emulation with a fake /dev/dsp. Trying to
emulate that is especially inefficient and buggy.
 >
 > the problem is in the SL library inside libplib. It would require to
be updated with pulseaudio.
 > Asuming this is not a wontfix.
 >
 >

#1043484#15
Date:
2025-06-25 20:41:35 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer


Here's a patch with pulseaudio support (applied last). I made it with AI
and don't understand exactly what's it's doing, so don't bother to ask
me. I did my best to avoid the AI weirdness. I did design decisions, the
AI wasn't able to do it on it's own. I'm amazed that it works.

On a high level, it has a thin wrapper as the expected sound interface
of the library and a pulseaudio manager class with a thread as the
backend. I split it this way so that there's only one pulseaudio
managing object and avoid synchronization and blocking writes issues.

it works on my slow laptop, maybe on a faster machine other
synchronization bugs will show up.

the target application for the fix is tuxkart, the ancestor of supertuxkart.
You can easily build it with makedeb on the mpr (it's like the AUR but
for debs)
https://mpr.makedeb.org/packages/tuxkart

i'm not sure how exactly to package the lib the debian way, i'm using
this to run configure. I didn't touch the building process, it requires
the pulseaudio flags to use the patch

CXXFLAGS="-fPIC -DSL_USE_PULSEAUDIO" CFLAGS="-fPIC -DSL_USE_PULSEAUDIO"
LDFLAGS="-fPIC -lpulse-simple -lpulse -lpthread" ./configure --prefix=/usr