SDL2 compatible libraries

[Rydgel]

This is not an issue, I'm just unsure where to post this. Feel free to move it.

First of all, congratulations on the release of sdl2-2.0.0. We have some really nice improvements here.

I would like to talk about the state of the various SDL2 sub-libraries.
So far the most used ones are:

• sdl2_image
• sdl2_ttf
• sdl2_mixer
• sdl2_net
• sdl2_gfx

There are existing wrappers for those ones. Some are not on Hackage, some are but relies on sdl2-1.3.1.
And so on. Some work have been started, for example by @sbidin, he updated his libs to work with the current version of sdl2.

I'm not sure what is the best way to deal with this, like contacting old library mainteners or starting doing them on our own. They should have the same treatment that you guys did for the sdl2 one. I think it would be awesome to have those wrappers inside haskell-game and Hackage.

Please tell me what do you guys think about this.

I am willing to help doing them.

[ocharles]

I think it would be awesome to have those wrappers inside haskell-game and Hackage.

I agree, I would be more than happy to incorporate those wrappers into this repository in fact. I can imagine each wrapper having a hierarchy like:

SDL.Image
SDL.Image.Raw

where SDL.Image is a nice Haskell API and SDL.Image.Raw is the underlying FFI representation.

I wouldn't fold these libraries directly into the sdl2 project, mostly because it complicates distribution of the C libraries. However, having them versioned in this repository makes it easy to git grep for API changes, and gives us a nice central place to track issues (that may be cross-cutting concerns).

[Rydgel]

I will be working on sdl2_image this weekend. I will study your high-levels bindings to make something similar and compatible. And working on small examples :)

[ocharles]

Fantastic! I suggest working in a fork of this repository, and creating an sdl2-image directory there.

[sdroege]

Might also make sense to import the others to give them more visibility and maybe attract more people willing to work on them

[Rydgel]

Sorry people, I'm busier than expected. I couldn't start working on this.
Also @ocharles, is this the way you see the directory structure?

Should I just drop a sdl2-image directory in the repo root.
Or should I move everything to a sdl2 directory, then create a sdl2-image at the same level of it?

[sbidin]

Aside from sdl2_net (which is commonly not wrapped at all due to the language providing better networking mechanisms out of the box), the libraries mentioned in the introductory post are now all on Hackage and I believe compatible with the latest haskell-game/sdl2 version:

• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sdl2-image
• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sdl2-ttf
• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sdl2-mixer
• http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sdl2-gfx

[Rydgel]

Thank you this is awesome @sbidin

[akhra]

@sbidin Any chance you'd like to add those to Stackage?

[sbidin]

@tejon Sure! I've opened a pull request to do so for all libs except sdl2-ttf, which I am neither an author nor maintainer of.

Edit: Possibly Rongcui might like to add sdl2-ttf to Stackage if he has the time? @rongcuid I believe only maintainers can add their packages to Stackage.

[rongcuid]

I am glad to, but how do I add? Also, I am not entirely sure whether my package is stable enough, because I have not touched it recently, so it would be quite insufficiently tested.

[akhra]

How to add.

As long as it builds within the current Stackage Nightly, I think it's fine; Stackage isn't concerned with what the package does, only that it's fully dependency-compatible within the environment. Worst case, you probably get some more eyes finding bugs!

[sbidin]

Stackage LTS 8.0 is now out, and it includes sdl2-image, sdl2-mixer and sdl2-gfx.