libsdl1.2debian package has no NAS sound driver compiled in and a spurious description about that

[oitofelix]

NAS stands for Network Audio System and is used to send audio through a network. It's specially suited to XDMCP connections where the X server cannot handle remote sound input or output. Besides its usefulness there are relatively few software written to work with it. Luckily SDL is one of them. As every major application has SDL support it's easy to interface with a NAS server since there is a NAS driver to SDL.

The problem is that Ubuntu SDL package (libsdl1.2) ships with _no_ NAS driver compiled in. I discovered that trying to play over network with

AUDIOSERVER=<nas_server_address>:0 SDL_AUDIODRIVER=nas mplayer -ao sdl <stream>

when SDL failed saying there is no such driver.

Then I fetched the libsdl1.2 source package and found that it was flagged to not build with NAS support as you can see in the following snippet of debian/rules file:

confflags = --disable-rpath --enable-sdl-dlopen --disable-loadso \
            --disable-video-ggi --disable-video-svga --disable-video-aalib \
            --disable-nas --disable-esd --disable-arts \
            --disable-alsa-shared --disable-pulseaudio-shared \
            --disable-x11-shared

Note the --disable-nas in the beginning of 3rd line. Of course I have built it myself wiping out that flag. It works well. I've been playing internet radio stream with Audacious over SDL's NAS driver for a couple of days.

Surprisingly the libsdl1.2debian package's description says that NAS is one of the four audio driver compiled in. Take a look at transcription of libsdl1.2debian package's description:

 SDL is a library that allows programs portable low level access to
 a video framebuffer, audio output, mouse, and keyboard.
 .
 This version of SDL is compiled with X11 and caca graphics
 drivers and OSS, ALSA, NAS and PulseAudio sound drivers.

Despite that, this bug report is filled against the lack of SDL's NAS support not against the, for the time being, spurious package description.

I'll be little more emphatic: the NAS support is expected, is trivial to build in, and last but not least works well. Let's include it by default.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: libsdl1.2debian 1.2.15-5ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-22.34-generic 3.5.7.2
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu9
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jan 13 01:24:30 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-01-08 (4 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120423)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: libsdl1.2
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2013-01-09 (3 days ago)

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

In the changelog, the Debian maintainer notes that NAS was disabled because of pulseaudio, but not everyone uses pulseaudio (like Lubuntu and a lot of Debian users), so I also wonder why the NAS option needed to be eliminated.

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

Please do not change a bug back to 'New' once it is 'Confirmed'.