On Fri, 24 Oct 2003, [iso-8859-1] Duncan Morison wrote: >At the end of the day ATi stuff breaks GLUT whilst >Nvidia stuff doesn't. You're very wrong there. GLUT itself is what is broken. GLUT is not open source software with an OSI approved OSS compatible license. The GLUT source code license does not permit modification and redistribution, and as such, nobody can "legally" modify GLUT even to fix bugs in it, and then ship the resulting binaries. This causes a major problem, because the GLUT source code contains a large number of problems including security holes, and we are not able to fix them due to the license. The other problem this causes, is that GLUT configures some things at compile time based on the features of the currently installed libGL. So, the GLUT that we shipped, has features built into it that are conditionaly enabled based on what OpenGL features Mesa libGL supports. If you replace your libGL with either ATI *or* Nvidia's libGL (or any other 3rd party libGL), if that libGL does not contain 100% of the functionality of Mesa libGL, then GLUT breaks. Nvidia's libGL does not implement some of the SGI extensions since they're rather obsolete nowadays, however Mesa libGL does. That causes GLUT to be unuseable. Most likely ATI's libGL is in the same boat, however I've never received bug reports about this problem from ATI users - only tonnes of reports from rather upset Nvidia users. It's possible that Nvidia's latest drivers may have added support for these older SGI extensions, or put dummy stub functions or some other workaround in place to get past the GLUT braindamage. Taking the GLUT src.rpm and recompiling it after you install ATI or Nvidia's libGL is reported to make this problem go away, as the new GLUT reconfigures itself at compile time to the currently installed libGL. Since we have no way of dealing with GLUT in any sane fashion and can not legally modify it, we didn't have a heck of a lot of choice with what to do with GLUT. The author of GLUT (under a huge coincidence, he works at Nvidia now) wont relicense GLUT under a sane OSS license, and he specifically does not want people modifying and redistributing it as he fears that people will add new features and other stuff to the code and he considers GLUT to be officially feature complete. As such, glut was removed from Fedora Core, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is no longer supported by Red Hat. I have added freeglut to Fedora Core, however the freeglut present is ancient and kindof klunky. A new version, freeglut-2.0.0 is out now which is supposed to be 100% glut replacement and totally true open source written from scratch, and licensed under the MIT (XFree86) license. This is not in rawhide/Fedora yet, but it will be in the future once I have time to properly package it and test it with a lot of GLUT software and work the kinks out. I might provide a freeglut 2.0.0 update for Fedora Core 1 later on, but if not, it'll be in Fedora Core 2. So just to summarize: Any GLUT problems you experience with applications refusing to run or refusing to compile, are neither Nvidia nor ATI bugs/problems - they are really broken bugs in GLUT itself, and we are not able to legally fix them. This problem will go away in the near future when we replace glut with freeglut. Hope this helps. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
