Re: [Plib-users] Fwd: Re: flightgear problem

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

pieter bonne wrote:
> 
> greetings,
> 
> First of all, thanks for such a lengthy response.. It's all quite clear to me
> now.. So in a nutshell, the problem I am experiencing is due to a bug in that
> version of mesa.. I can't really comprehend how such an important call can
> get bugged, but anyway.. Due to that bug, the context doesn't "seem" ready to
> flightgear (using plib)..

Well, there are two reason why that may have sneaked through

  * It only seems to affect RedHat 7.x and Mandrake 8 and most 'power users'
    have abandoned those two distro's following the gcc debacle.  Hence none
    of the Mesa developers are likely to have tested under RedHat to any great
    degree.

  * As you have noticed, many other programs (Quake for instance) do not bother
    to check that the current rendering context is valid.  The only reason that
    PLIB really needs to do it is that it's used by a hundred applications and
    I have no control over whether one or other of them is breaking the rules.
    Hence I need to protect the library from false allegations by doing that test.
    Quake has no need to do that - they know that they open the OpenGL window
    and that it opened without error and hence there *MUST* be a valid rendering
    context.   PLIB cannot be certain that this has happened if that application's
    author screwed up.

> I don't think the fact of the 2.96 compiler has anything to do with all
> this.. All packages I installed are compiled by this compiler!

Yes - but the problem only shows up on RedHat/Mandrake and the only thing that's
really obviously in common that could possibly have an effect is the C compiler.

You *are* aware of the 2.96/2.97 compiler "issues" - right?   The deal is (in
a nutshell) that the last released version of the GCC product was 2.95 - they
were working towards the major new 3.0.0 release but didn't get there in time
to make the RedHat 7.0 release date.  What RedHat did was to grab the "weekly
snapshot" of the pre-3.0 CVS load and release that into the world.  The GCC
team objected - RedHat didn't listen.  The Kernel team said that the kernel
wouldn't compile with 2.96 so RedHat also released the 2.95 compiler under
the name 'kgcc' - which you'll have on your disk.  However since 2.95 and 2.96
can't share the same libraries (and 2.96 can't share with 3.0 either), you can't
just recompile things like PLIB and Mesa using kgcc.

So basically, they TOTALLY screwed up RH 7.0.  Everyone complained bitterly
but *AMAZINGLY* they didn't go back to 2.95 in RH 7.1 - so the GCC team
(who get most of their funding from RedHat) gave this "bogus" version the
number 2.97...but it's still just as broken.  Mandrake (as usual) blindly
followed RedHat's lead - so Mandrake 8.0 is also "broken".

It is unsuprising under the circumstances that none of the serious developers
out there are particularly inclined to try to diagnose problems that only
affect RedHat 7.x or Mandrake 8.x under these circumstances.

Personally, I think RedHat is becoming like another Microsoft - deliberately
using incompatible versions to lock people into their software distro - hoping
that their market share is large enough to lock people in.

They shouldn't be allowed to get away with this - so, I recommend that you
keep RedHat's support lines as busy as possible with these complaints - either
that or switch to Debian, SuSE, Slackware or one of the smaller distro's.

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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