[Mesa-dev] Merge floating to master

[Lucas Stach]

Am Mittwoch, den 02.03.2011, 08:22 +0100 schrieb Lucas Stach:
> Hello all,
> 
> I want to bring up a an issue discussed some time ago. The support for
> floating point textures and rendertargets currently lives in a branch
> maintained by Marek Olšák. It's nice to see Marek rebases this branch
> from time to time, to bring it up to date, but I don't think this should
> be a permanent state.
> 
> We need to discuss how we want to deal with patented features. I doubt
> floating point support will be the last patented feature in the OpenGL
> evolution.
> 
> I think the best way to go is to merge floating to master but only
> expose the extensions in question if the user specifies something like
> --enable-patented at compile time. From a lawyers sight it shouldn't
> make a difference since currently the code for patented features like
> s3tc and floating point support is laying around on the same public git
> servers as mesa.
> 
> Merging this code into master should make it easier to maintain and I
> see no legal problem if we let it up to the user whether to use this
> code or compile his mesa without any patented features.
> 
> --Lucas

This matter won't go away if we ignore it. We will never get full OpenGL
3.0+ compliance if we don't merge in the floating branch.

Attached you will find a patch against Marek's floating branch to hide
the patented extensions behind a configure switch. Please ACK if you
think we could merge in floating or give some opinion why you think we
couldn't merge.

Thanks,
-- Lucas