Norman Vine writes: > Getting rid of GLUT dependencies is a good thing > even if the message in the CVS Log is a more then > a *little* scary since it 'mentions' moving to SDL
We should probably have an open discussion on the developers list about this at some point. I'm not ready to make the jump at the moment, but I've been investigating the possibilities. The downsides that I am aware of are: - No real SDL support for cygwin (or existing stuff very difficult or impossible to make work? - SDL folks do not feel like spending time on cygwin and prefer to work with myngwin.) - Works well with mygwin, but sends stdout/stderr to a file rather than to the console. "tail -f" in a separate console should be a possible work around, but this appears to impose a huge system wide frame rate hit. - plib dependencies on glut. As I understand it, at least pui (the opengl gui stuff which flightgear uses heavily) has a lot of glut dependencies hardwired in. I'd love to be wrong about this. Positives: - SDL is being actively developed. GLUT is encumbered and further development is not really possible. FreeGLUT is an alternative, but I don't believe it supports all the platforms that GLUT supports and doesn't seem to have a ripsnorting development pace either. - The default GLUT is problematic in the latest RedHat, and many linux distributions ship with a version that doesn't work correctly with catch/throw which results in segfaults whenever an exception is thrown. - SDL seems to be the current "in" thing. - A lot of people seem to be asking for or pushing for a move to SDL. It seems generally better supported by the various linux distributions. On other platforms you are probably going to have to download build the libs yourself whether it be glut or SDL. There will certainly be some pain if we switch. Perhaps some glut features would not have direct SDL counterparts??? It might take time to migrate all the glut usages over to SDL leaving some things broke/disabled for a while? There will probably be some "configure" type issues that will need to be ironed out over time. SDL isn't exactly a no-brainer to install either ... Debian comes with about 18 different varients. I picked one and it seemed to work for some demos, but who knows which one I was supposed to pick. Anyone else have any positives or negatives? Any red flags, or additional issues we should consider? > attached patch gets rid of all mention of GLUT from > the cockpit directory I appreciate the fixes ... I had looked at that code yesterday and assumed it was going to be much harder to make it glut free. Thanks, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
