[Development] Is DirectFB dead?

Holger Freyther holger at freyther.de
Wed Mar 16 09:13:23 CET 2016


> On 16 Mar 2016, at 07:09, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> 


> I'd like to turn off the automatic detection in the Unix configure for Qt 5.6. 
> This will solve the problem of the failure to compile (with a hammer).

sure


> Holger: do you know any more details about the project? Is it dead? Is there 
> an active fork of it anywhere? Even archives of past releases?

the FOSS development of DirectFB seems to be dead but I don't know the details or reasons. I think it is unlikely that (git.)directfb.org will be back online and the code on github is also only an old version of it.


> If there's no action to revive the project, we should declare it deprecated in 
> Qt 5.7, with the note that we aren't testing at all, not even to see if it 
> compiles, and later remove in Qt 5.8.

I was wondering what it means for the Qt project. The reality (at least two years ago) in the Set-Top-Box market was that the SoC vendors would (heavily) modify DirectFB and ship it to their customers. Given their general lack of upstream involvement I would be surprised if they drop DirectFB just because directfb.org and the development behind it is dead.

But your approach seems fine, deprecate it in 5.7 (and print a big warning on configure?) and see if any of the users are willing to invest in the maintenance.

kind regards
	holger


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