[Mesa-dev] talloc (Was: Merge criteria for glsl2 branch)

[José Fonseca]

On Thu, 2010-08-12 at 07:58 -0700, Matt Turner wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 7:00 AM, José Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> >> Really optimising for the wrong bunch of people here by dragging this
> >> stuff into mesa git.
> >
> > Many projects do this: they include the source of other projects, to
> > make it easier to build without having to build all dependencies.
> 
> This is true, but it's also quite annoying. Take ioquake3 for example,
> in order to make it simpler for Windows and Mac OS developers, they
> include in SVN things like the libSDL headers, OpenAL headers, static
> libraries for OpenAL, libSDL, and libcurl, and the sources for
> libspeex, libcurl, and zlib.
> 
> So the Linux packagers have to jump through hoops trying to untangle this mess.
> 
> What Dave's saying with "optimizing for the wrong people" is that
> we're including lots of things in the Mesa code that most people (most
> users of Mesa are Linux/BSD/UNIX users) don't need, and by including
> these things with Mesa, we're making it more difficult to package Mesa
> for most people.
>
> Frankly, it's also a bit hard to empathize with any "this makes
> Windows development harder" arguments when we don't have the code that
> you're building on Windows. But I digress...

How come? All code to build on softpipe/llvmpipe on windows is checked
into mesa (at least until talloc dependency is added). Read
http://www.mesa3d.org/install.html#scons for softpipe instructions, and
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/src/gallium/drivers/llvmpipe/README for llvmpipe. It gives you a software implementation of OpenGL way better than the one that comes bundled with Windows. 

> Surely moving external build dependencies to another git repository
> would satisfy everyone.
> 
> On another note, Dave might sound annoyed in these emails, but if he's
> like me, it's because he's read lots of emails about problems caused
> by Windows that, again, most people don't care about, and has held
> back on saying anything until now. It is frustrating to see things
> like merging glsl2 held up because of Windows.

That's short sighted. Windows has a lot of weight economically, and
Gallium is only where it is today because it tapped into that. So you
focus on the negative aspects of supporting Windows, but you ignore all
the goodness that came from (in particular all the QA and bugfixing done
with windows apps, that are far more complex than most stuff available
for linux, in particular games & CAD apps).

Anyway, if you turn this into a Windows vs Linux battle I'm bound to
loose here. Especially because I don't even use it personally -- for me
it's no different than another embedded platform for which I write
drivers and debug remotely from my Linux development machine. It's just
that I don't like to shit where I eat.

Jose