Re: XFree86, Mesa, Debian, and libGLU revisited

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

Hi,

 sorry for getting in the middle of the conversation...
 
 >> Branden Robinson <branden@deadbeast.net> writes:

 > The XFree86 source tree, which contains Mesa (libGL and libOSMesa,
 > the off-screen rendering library), does *not* contain libGLU.  I
 > don't honestly know why this choice was originally made (I get the
 > impression it has something do with libGLU being written in C++ --
 > no other part of the XFree86 source distribution is).

 Brian stated some months ago (and again last week) he wants to retire
 the libGLU code from Mesa and use the SGI's Sample Implementation
 code instead.  What you say seems to indicate he changed his mind.
 One issue with this idea is that the SI is under the SGI Free License
 B[1] which was discussed on debian-legal sometime ago.  Our concern
 (James' and mine) focused on a clause that states you can't implement
 the SI in hardware (or something like that, I don't remember the
 exact wording off the top of my head).  -legal raised some questions
 regarding other clauses in the license (most people seemed to be cool
 with the one I mention), but nothing clear ever came out.

 Anyway, you might be interested in exerting some pressure in order to
 resolve this issue, because GLX on the XFree86 source tree is under
 this same license (I recall sending you a mail about this more than a
 month ago, but xserver-xfree86/copyright doesn't list this license)

 On the positive side, if James Treacy (our mesa maintainer) isn't
 interested in doing so, eventually I'd like to package the whole SI
 for Debian.  I already have done a bit of work on this, but building
 it has proven to be tricky, plus I've been tied up with other things
 lately...
 
 > + The off-screen rendering library, libOSMesa, is not yet available in the
 >   Debian Mesa packages (last I checked); this should be remedied when an
 >   official upstream version of Mesa is released with it (which I don't
 >   think has happened yet) and when the Debian package maintainer then
 >   releases it

 OSMesa has been a part of Mesa for quite a long time.

 Cheers,

                                   Marcelo

 [1] http://oss.sgi.com/projects/FreeB