SDL_mixer is my least favourite piece of software today and is being very closely followed by SDL_image. A few updates that should have taken me about half an hour today ended up taking over three hours due to bugs in these packages.

I had a bunch of SDL related packages (sdl_gfx, sdl_image, sdl_mixer, sdl_perl) to update. These are usually fun, because they require extensive game playing for testing! My first point of testing is always Chromium B.S.U. Everything looked good there so I upload the updated sdl_gfx and sdl_image packages. Now for the second line of testing: Frozen Bubble. Interesting… SDL_mixer has an soname bump despite being an update from 1.2.9 to 1.2.10. Stranger things have happened (heimdal likes slipping soname bumps into minor version releases). So a rebuild of many other packages is in order. Rebuild frozen-bubble and try again…

FATAL: Couldn't load '/usr/share/frozen-bubble/gfx/loading.png' into a SDL::Surface.

Hmm… looks like an SDL_image issue. I can confirm this using some other games too. It turns out the SDL_image 1.2.9 release is very broken; just not broken enough to break Chromium B.S.U. So much for my extensive testing… It appears fixed in upstream SVN, but I am feeling lazy and just downgrade it while waiting for the new release that appears to be due in the next day.

Now, try Frozen Bubble again. Still no good…

[Graphics..........] [Sound Init] at /usr/games/bin/frozen-bubble line 312


Looks like the SDL_mixer update is causing issues. That may not be surprising given the soname bump. This is confirmed by starting the game with the --no-sound option. While searching for a fix, I discovered that the soname bump was an accident. Apparently, this has been fixed, but either the source was missed or something else was going on. The good news is, I do not have to do a big rebuild now (but the rebuilds I had already done were a waste). The bad new is, SDL_mixer is still broken… The change-log in SVN lists this:

Fixed bug loading multiple music files

Pull that patch and we can all play games again! Luckily, not all updates are that painful.

Edit: updates are now available for both SDL_mixer and SDL_image that fix these issues.