On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 17:25 -0600, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 02:41:05AM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
>
> The GLU package is, uhm, I don't know. At some point I talked with
> Branden about it, but we never did anything. The xfree86 (and now the
> x.org) are the ones duplicating that code. And this has nothing to do
> with some "my turf/your turf" thing. It was more of a "this code
> works, that code doesn't" thing. All three packages (libglu1-mesa,
> libglu1-xorg, xlibmesa-glu) are optional. The -xorg thing is cute, but
> someone missed the point of -mesa (and I'm probably to blame). -mesa
> is there because at some point there were two implementations shipped
> with Mesa. The one by Brian Paul and the one from the OpenGL SI
> provided by SGI, so there were two packages (libglu1-mesa and
> libglu1-sgi). The -sgi one was provided by a package that never made
> it thru the NEW queue and after some months I got sick of waiting and
> removed the package from the queue, so it never actually made it to the
> archive. Anyways, it happened that at some other point Brian removed
> his implementation, fixed bugs in the SGI one and shipped that with
> Mesa. That's why nowadays the -mesa package provides the SGI
> implementation.
>
> AFAIK, the -xorg package is byte for byte the same thing as the -mesa
> package.
And I've suggested getting rid of xlibmesa-glu{,-dbg,-dev} several
times, without success. However, this will happen automatically with
X.Org 7.0, see below.
> > Why this duplication of code and which of this two implementations is
> > the preferred one?
>
> "It depends"
>
> What hardware do you have and what do you want to do?
>
> On some machines I have NVIDIA hardware because it's the only hardware
> that supports current OpenGL features both in the hardware and in its
> driver (a recent Radeon card is useless to me if it supports OpenGL 1.5
> but its driver doesn't, which is the case with the DRI drivers).
<OT_plug>There's a vendor provided driver for these cards that supports
current OpenGL features as well.</OT_plug>
> > Could I replace the xorg packages with the mesa packages without ill
> > effects resp. without loss of functionality?
>
> You mean replacing xlibmesa-gl by libgl1-mesa-dri? It should work, but
> haven't tested it.
It would have to Conflicts-Replaces-Provides libgl1 for that to work.
> > Is this an attempt to smooth the transition from the xorg packages to
> > the mesa ones and in the course of the X modularisation to get
> > completely rid of the GL/GLU code in xorg (and the libgl*-xorg
> > packages) and use mesa directly as an external library? If there is
> > such a transition how will it take place?
>
> Not currently, or at least not one that I know of.
X.Org will indeed no longer ship copies of the Mesa bits as of 7.0.
That'll be an automatic transition so to speak. :)
> 2) Someone with the proper hardware should test the several (there's at
> least 8 of them IIRC) drivers that ship inside the -dri package with
> the current (6.8) and future (6.9, 7.0) x.org server.
I'll gladly test the r200 driver once it's built on powerpc and the
libgl1 issue mentioned above is solved.
> My interest in the mesa package comes from the fact that I develop
> OpenGL-based applications, which is why I picked it up when it was
> orphaned and why I've been maintaining it for the last few years.
And you've been doing a great job, keep it up. But if you could use a
helping hand, I wouldn't mind co-maintaining or something. No request,
just an offer.
--
Earthling Michel Dänzer | Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
Libre software enthusiast | http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer
