At Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:03:02 +0100,
Jan Danielsson wrote:
> 
>    For my part, I'm using NetBSD as a server and a "desktop" system, and
> it's doing an excellent job. However, I recently started working on a
> wxWidgets project which uses OpenGL. This made me realize that I would
> really like hardware GL acceleration. But on the other hand, Mesa works,
> so I can continue using NetBSD for this development, as long as I don't
> load huge and complex geometries.

As a bit of a side track, I'd like to point out that with the advent of
approximately half of everything desktop-like using OpenGL these many
applications have become totally unusable on older hardware.

Once upon a time I could run something like Ethereal on a
SPARCstation-2.  Now it won't even run usuably on an SS-20 and it took
nearly a week to build because of all the unnecessary OpenGL/MESA
requirement forced on it by it use of GTK2+.

When I mark MesaLib as out-of-date in a run of pkgdepgraph|dotty the
consequences (the number of non-gree circles) are downright frightening.
(and that's on a machine with only 430 packages installed!)

Even more interesting is the count of those OpenGL-using applications
that don't even make use of any actual 2D graphics in their output and
yet which require OpenGL (and strictly ethereal is effectively one of
them).  I'd say xchat, gtkspell, and gaim probably fall into that
category, and no doubt there are many more that I've not yet built.

Another user of OpenGL gives us one of the most hillarious lies in the
package descriptions today, and that is "fltk", the description of which
suggests that it is "small and modular enough to be statically linked".
It alone might be, but it's required components are anything but.  The
only program I've built so far using fltk is gargantuan in comparison to
its own code (static-linked on sparc):

	$ size /usr/pkg/bin/htmldoc
	text	data	bss	dec	hex	filename
	2263904	93272  	425032 	2782208	2a7400 	/usr/pkg/bin/htmldoc

	$ size -t /usr/pkg/lib/libfltk.a | tail -1
	334112 	14520  	12148  	360780 	5814c  	(TOTALS)
	$ size -t /usr/pkg/lib/libGLU.a | tail -1
	356056 	31148  	0      	387204 	5e884  	(TOTALS)
	$ size -t /usr/pkg/lib/libGL.a | tail -1
	1957672	75122  	43437  	2076231	1fae47 	(TOTALS)

(I should do a link map of something like htmldoc to see if it really
does pull in much of OpenGL and MesaLib, though with its size it's hard
to see that it doesn't pull in lots, given that all the other required
libraries are much smaller.)

Meanwhile I'd really like to have some CAD/drafting tool as handy to use
as xfig but which could do full 3D designs.  It wouldn't be bad at all
if such a tool made use of OpenGL, and if it then ran much faster on an
open-source supported graphics card with full 3D accelleration!

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>       Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>