Re: [ogl-sample] Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Re: Thanxs for SGI's GLU 1.3 libs !

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Sven Goethel wrote:

> Aehem, well, but how about splitting the Mesa distribution from:
> 	MesaLib & MesaDemos
> to:
> 	MesaLib & (MesaSGIGLU || MesaGLU) & MesaDemos
> 
> where, of course, the MesaSGIGLU is preferred ..
 
If there are going to be ugly issues with which C++ runtime library
SGI-GLU pulls-in/requires then I think it's vital from an application
support perspective to minimise the number of varients there can
be out there.  I would not want to see (say) Debian and RedHat shipping
the SGI version of GLU with SuSE and Corel shipping GLU-classic.

I'd also oppose splitting GLU off from Mesa's main download because
that will result in lots of end-users installing "Mesa" and yet having
no valid GLU implementation because they failed to download/install it.

Supporting OpenGL applications under Linux is hard enough as it is -
look at the mail archives for an active OpenGL application (TuxRacer
for example) and you'll see that at least 95% of the posts are OpenGL
installation problems of one kind or another.  That consumes an insane
amount of people's time - PLEASE, let's not make it any harder.

IMHO, 99% of widely distributed OpenGL apps for Linux will not be
using the problematic functions in GLU-classic - because those programs
were almost certainly developed using that library and either don't use
the broken functions or have work-arounds that work OK. Hence most
existing applications will get no benefit from SGI-GLU.  In any case,
the kinds of applications that need things like tesselators and spline
patches tend not to be games - more often they are things like scientific
visualisers and custom applications which are not widely circulated.

Hence, I suggest that until the g++ standard library stuff settles
A
down, we avoid making SGI-GLU the default.  I think the Mesa documentation
should point out that we *WILL* make the transition - but not yet - and
advise people who experience problems with GLU-classic to switch over
immediately.  Meanwhile I think we should continue to ship GLU-classic
by default.

---
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