First, I don't agree with a one-size-fits-all enable-patented flag at all.

It should be one flag per patent, to give the opportunity for companies to 
license patents individually: imagine a company making an embedded device with 
a mesa 3d driver which uses patented feature A but needs no patented feature B.

Your argument that we need a flag to enable everything is not true, as a single 
patent does not apply uniformly to all drivers. For example, floating point 
does not apply to software drivers, perhaps some hardware may be designed to 
work around it, or the hw vendor already has a patent license for hardware that 
covers all platforms. Therefore, there can always be cases where patented 
feature A can be enabled but not patented feature B.

And I agree with Dave -- the current dynamic library approach is much better.

So let's not put everything in the same basket, and focus on the issue at hand, 
the floating point feature.

Jose


________________________________________
From: mesa-dev-bounces+jfonseca=vmware....@lists.freedesktop.org 
[mesa-dev-bounces+jfonseca=vmware....@lists.freedesktop.org] On Behalf Of Jon 
Severinsson [j...@severinsson.net]
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 1:29
To: mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: [Mesa-dev] [PATCH 0/4] import the txc_dxtn code from       
libtxc_dxtn into mesa (Was: Merge floating to master)

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 9:47 AM, Jon Severinsson <j...@severinsson.net> wrote:
> As you are about to introduce --enable-patented for floating point
> textures, I thought the same functionality should be used for s3tc
> support.
>
> This patch series does so by importing the code from libtxc_dxtn into
> mesa and build it instead of the dlopened library.

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 01:57:51, Dave Airlie wrote:
> This is kind off different. At the moment you can distribute a mesa
> binary and someone can just drop libtxc_dxtn into place and it'll all
> work.

Currently that is true, but after floating support are added it will not "all
work". For *all* to work you'll have to recompile mesa anyway, and recompiling
mesa is easier than recompiling mesa *and* compiling libtxc_dxtn.

Regards
Jon
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