Re: xlibmesa naming and relationships
On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 09:27:28AM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Marcelo was wondering why I bumped the name to xlibmesa4-* for my
> packages, and I pointed out that having xlibmesa3-*, for Mesa 4,
> would be horrifically stupid and misleading.
JFTR, no, I wasn't. Michel was courteous enough to sent me a copy of a
discussion which he deemed interesting for me (thanks). I replied.
I don't like the "3" is any of these packages (xlibmesa3, mesa3g, ...)
because it doesn't reflect *anything*. In the case of mesa3g is just
historical baggage and in the case of xlibmesa3 it reflects something
that's an (almost meaningless) implementation detail. The other reason
why I hate that "3" is because I always forget where it goes in the
name (to the point that I'm almost sure I got it wrong in what I just
wrote).
On Wed, Feb 05, 2003 at 03:24:07PM -0500, Branden Robinson replied:
> > So, while I can't fault your logic of Mesa 3 being in 4.2.1 ... ;)
>
> Okay. I agree. Given that the soversion isn't terribly meaningful
> in the case of Mesa, in my opinion the library package name should
> communicate the major version number of Mesa itself.
Well, actually the version (the shared object version, mind you) *is*
meaningful in the case of Mesa. It implements version 1.x of the
OpenGL API. If you don't know what that means, please go read *both*
the OpenGL 1.x spec and the GLX 1.x spec. Both are readly available at
http://www.opengl.org/
In short: the OpenGL API is fixed. It is extended via so called
"OpenGL extesions". Extensions are usally not visible as symbols being
exported by libGL.so.1 but instead there are specialized functions to
retreive the addresses of the requested code. Think dlopen if you
wish. Some extensions eventually make it to the core API and these
become available via the library (unfortunately). The current
implementation in Mesa corresponds *almost* to OpenGL 1.4, but the
library is still called libGL.so.1.
I have been toying with the idea of creating virtual packages libgl1.1,
libgl1.2, libgl1.3 and so on, but I see downsides to it with very
little gain.
> However, Policy doesn't mandate that sort of thing, and if Marcelo
> wants to do things differently than I do, there's no harm in that.
> All the important issues, like what the virtual package names mean,
> we already agreed upon, and that's what counts to people trying to
> get work done.
Agreed.
For the record: I dislike the proposal of using the Mesa version
present in XFree86 as part of the xlibmesaN package name. Merging Mesa
5 in the XFree86 tree will happen RSN, and as far as I understand
Brian's intentions, there will be a Mesa 6... that would mean changing
the name of the package way too often.
--
Marcelo
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