[Mesa-dev] Another Take on the S3TC issue

[Roland Mainz]

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 10:33 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> wrote:
> On 08/13/2013 01:27 PM, Roland Mainz wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org>
>> wrote:
>>> On 08/13/2013 11:53 AM, Uwe Schmidt wrote:
[snip]
>>> Until S3 grants it's IP to OIN or the patents expire, this is going to be
>>> the situation.  We've been through this mental exercise of the last 5
>>> years
>>> more times than I can count, and we always come back to the same place.
>>
>> Please don't hit me with a stick if this has been asked
>> |powl(INT64_MAX, INT64_MAX)| times... but... erm... adding the code
>> (sample implementation, "... do not use without a license from S3 and
>> the ritual scarification of at least one software engineer...") but
>> having it off in the default build won't work... right ?
>
> That is more difficult for end-users than the current situation.  In the
> current situation, your distro can build Mesa (no S3TC), and, if you live in
> a country without software patents, you can just "drop in" the libtxc_dxtn
> library to get compression.  Putting it in Mesa, along with making the
> distros really uncomfortable, would mean you'd have to rebuild Mesa.

Sounds reasonable for me...

> Did I mention that we've been through this mental exercise a few times?

Erm... I'm wondering... why does the S3TC issue come up every few
months out of it's grave and haunt the list (and your nerves) ?

----

Bye,
Roland

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