On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Brett Johnson wrote:
> > Well,
> >
> > what about the point that there are different vendors out there
> > supplying a libGL, that for some reason uses a totally different
> > dispatch mechanism ?
>
> Are you speaking of driver writers here? If so, what I've proposed won't
> affect them in any way. If you're not talking about driver writers, I
> don't understand your point. Aren't we trying to create a standard here
> so that there _won't_ be various flavors of libGL floating around?
NO!
There are commercial OpenGL ports for Linux out there - and we
should not shut them out. Mesa is certainly the most important
and most prevalent OpenGL for Linux (although it's technically
not even OpenGL)...but the commercial OpenGL's are important too.
The point of this standard is to ensure that a program compiled
for Mesa will run if the user happens to have installed a
commercial OpenGL - and vice-versa.
If Linux takes off on the desktop (as we all clearly expect - or
we wouldn't be here), then we can expect some of the hardware
vendors to want to produce their own OpenGL implementations rather
than use Linux and reveal their precious secrets by using Mesa.
I predict this will happen more and more as hardware T&L comes
on stream over the next year or two.
We NEED for those commercial OpenGL's to play together.
That's why we are here.
> If one wants to write Windows OpenGL code, one has to
> use wgl. And if one wants to write OpenGL code for X, one has to use glX.
> If you want to write code that compiles under both platforms, you've got
> to have some sort of porting layer that deals with all the other differences
> between the two interfaces (most of which are far more difficult to deal
> with than the simple change I'm proposing).
The other view is that it's hard enough to get games developers to
port games to Linux as it is. Making that task harder than it
needs to be is counterproductive.
I saw a survey a couple of months ago that said that 80% of home-computer
users who were asked why they didn't switch to Linux said it was
due to the lack of good games. (I forget where I saw that figure).
Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
Raytheon Systems Inc. (817)619-2466 (Fax)
Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hti.com
Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
