Stephen J Baker wrote:
>
> On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Jon Taylor wrote:
>
> > > 1. Linux (Unix) and Windows are, by far, the most popular platforms for
> > > Mesa/OpenGL. The GLX and WGL interfaces are very well established.
> > > Nobody will use a Mesa-specific interface instead of GLX/WGL since
> > > they'd be limiting themselves to Mesa versus many other OpenGL
> > > implementations.
> >
> > Untrue. If the new generic interface can be implemented using a
> > dynamic library based system, it would not necessarily have to be
> > Mesa-specific. It could be implemented directly or as a wrapper layer
> > around the GLX/WGL/etc interfaces, whether those interfaces are
> > themselves implemented by Mesa or another OpenGL-type library/driver.
>
> Which is another way to say that this hypothetical package would be a new
> kind of GLUT.
In a very general sense, yes. GLUT does a _lot_ of abstraction of
higher-level stuff (window management, input handling, gettimeofday(),
etc) which is not needed for a generic OpenGL interface such as we are
discussing.
> We need a new GLUT - so that's not such a bad idea.
We do, but we also need this generic OpenGL interface too.
> But putting it inside Mesa is (IMHO) a very bad idea.
I must have missed where this was proposed. I do not favor tying it to
Mesa either.
> > > If you can design a uniform layer on top of some of these interfaces
> > > you should consider how many people will actually make use of it
> > > before you expend a lot of time on it.
> >
> > This generic interface idea is a godsend, IMO. I see no reason why
> > this generic interface should not immediately be written. I volunteer
> > to write (or help write) the generic-to-GGIMesa and generic-to-GLX
> > wrappers, in both directions. If the generic interface works out, I'll
> > see about trying to get some game developers to support it. They should
> > be _very_ happy to have a platform-independent way to use OpenGL without
> > having to use GLUT, and also not tying them to X windows the way GLX
> > does....
>
> Why "without GLUT"? People seem to regard GLUT as some kind of inferior
> way to get at the windowing issues - when in fact it's actually pretty
> good.
GLUT does _WAY_ more stuff than is necessary for our purposes here.
> Personally, I quite like GLUT.
Me too, but...
> It has two serious problems:
>
> 1) It's not LGPL - so we can't modify and redistribute it.
Right.
> 2) Nobody likes the fact that your application is stuck inside
> glutMainLoop. That's trivial to fix - but see (1).
Also right.
> There are also a bunch of minor problems - but if there were an
> OpenSource version, they would be ironed out in the first week.
Rewriting all of Mark's code will take a while. I agree that it needs
to be done, but it will be a longer-term project and we have immediate
and specific needs here.
> What I'd like to see happen is a two-phase project:
>
> PHASE 1: Do a straight 'cleanroom' rewrite of GLUT so we can put it
> into the public domain with a clear conscience. This would
> aim to be a 100% perfect clone.
>
> PHASE 2: Fix the parts we don't like.
Sounds good. Get a CVS server set up and a basic autoconf-based
skeleton stub implementation going and I'll be happy to help.
Jon
_______________________________________________
Mesa-dev maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.mesa3d.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
