[hatari-devel] Shalll we remove deprecated features like SDL 1.2 now?

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxxxxx>]

 Hi,

A happy new year 2021 to everybody! Let's hope that it gets better
than 2020 (with regards to Covid-19) - though from a Hatari perspective
2020 has been pretty good already, with two new releases and lots of
improvements.

Now that the 2.3 release has been done, I'd like to start a discussion
about removing some features that have been marked as deprecated. I
think the most "important" one is currently SDL 1.2, since this version
of the library is not maintained since 2013 anymore, so most (all?)
developers use 2.0 these days, and the countless #ifdefs in the code
can be a real pain if you have to make changes in these areas.

Is anybody still actively using SDL 1.2, without the possibility to
upgrade to SDL 2.0 ? If so, on which system? Why is SDL 2.0 not an
option there yet?

Another item that I'd like to see removed is the old UAE core. It
also causes double maintenance in case you have to do changes in a
related area (e.g. when I did the rewrite of the GEMDOS HD Pexec code
during the 2.3 development cycle). I can still see that there is a
benefit of keeping the old UAE core around, e.g. it's a little bit
faster than the WinUAE core (but of it's of course also less accurate),
but is anybody really still using it, so that it's worth the effort of
keeping it in the source tree?

For the other deprecated things listed in doc/release-notes.txt I think
most people won't be affected much anyway, e.g. all modern distros ship
with python 3, so nobody should be affected if we remove support for
python 2 (which is EOL anyway) in the future.

 Thomas