On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, David Blythe 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.
>
> Well, then we were done several weeks ago since the implementations
> details are just that, implementation details, and continuing such
> a discussion is adding zero information.
No. Until we agree on glXGetProcAddress, we don't have a standard
that will let a single binary work with all the OpenGL's out there.
> That said, there are
> a bunch of us that are interested in having an interoperable dispatch
> infrastructure so that we can concievably support multiple heterogeoneous
> accelerators from different vendors under, say, XFree86. Perhaps we
> should move such a discussion of details to achieve such interoperability
> to another forum rather than clutter linux-base since it has nothing to do
> with app compatability and everything to do with vendor integration.
Well, no. Agreement on the interoperable dispatch infrastructure is
necessary as a proof-of-concept for a working glXGetProcAddress. There
is no sense in defining glXGetProcAddress to work in a manner that is
not widely implementable - or it won't get implemented and the goal
of having a single application binary that'll work with all i86
OpenGL's won't come to fruition.
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
