On Mon, Mar 27, 2000 at 09:42:07PM -0800, Ralph Giles wrote:
> That was my guess. Perhaps I misunderstood the objection of the oglbase,
> since it used to be called and ABI, and this has to do with filesystem
> standards. My apologies.
It may be stretching matters to call everything lumped into oglbase
an "ABI", but all of these things do need to be covered to ensure
runtime binary compatibility between app and shared library.
> Thanks for the summary. I was thinking in terms of binary compatibility,
> for which I think we just disagree,
Most of the decisions in this sort of standard are essentially
arbitrary; the exact path of a shared library matters much less than the
fact that there *is* an exact path to it.
> BTW, does the oglbase have an opinion on where we should stick our
> accelerated device drivers? glx.so still goes in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/?
No, it does not have an opinion. That's below the ABI level and is
up to the implementation. Of course it would be good for the various
implementations supporting loadable driver modules to specify as
explicitly and comprehensively as possible what they need done, too.
BTW, I suggest for future questions of this sort, just wading
through the mail archives and forming your own opinion. Given the amount
of heat we've had on the list, and the amount of time it's taken to
reach (nearly) closure, there's little likelihood that any of us - Allen
aside, possibly, since he's so admirably evenhanded - can give an
accurate and comprehensive description of *why* we made some particular
decision. And bringing it up again is likely to bring up all the reasons
why we should do it differently. Much like Usenet, where popular threads
never die - they just get revived periodically with new posters.
Jon Leech
SGI
