Re: LibGL

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 06:18:50PM +0100, Leopold Palomo Avellaneda wrote:
> Ok, it's very sophisticated but necessary to avoid problems as windows users 
> with the dlls.

At least we have versions shared libraries.  Windows often does not, or
at least no in an obvious way, which makes it hard to keep track if
which version you need.  Windows also often has failed to not make ABI
breakages in different versions of the same library.  On linux usually a
change to the ABI gives the library a new version, which is part of it's
filename, and hence you can have both the old and new version installed
at once.  Minor revisions that don't break ABI can be used in place of
older versions.

> so, if I want to use a package -a library) , that use GL,  built with libmesa, 
> I cannot link against it using nvidia libGL lib?

If it is built dynamically (almost everything is, and everything pretty
much should be), then it will simply load whichever libGL.so.1 is on
your system, be it mesa or nvidia or ati.  It will then use that.

Anything comiled staticly, will use whatever it has built in (I hope no
opengl program ever does this as it would be very stupid to do).  Since
there isn't even a static version of libGL I guess that isn't likely to
happen anyhow.

--
Len Sorensen