Perl OpenGL 0.56

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 01:54:22PM -0700, Bob Free wrote:
 
> Hi Niko - feel free to contact me regarding any build problems.  I (and many
> of our users) have been testing primarily with nvidia cards - so any
> feedback/bug-reports regarding other configurations is much appreciated.

(Taking pkg-perl-maintainers at lists.alioth.debian.org into the loop again)

Now that I've looked into it, the build system makes it a bit difficult
to build a distribution-wide binary package. The code in Makefile.PL
tries to ask the local X server for the GL extension it supports.
This doesn't work for automatic builds, which are done without $DISPLAY.
Even if it did, we don't want the list of supported GL extensions to be
based on the X server of the user building the package; that might be on
another host with another operating system / version entirely.

I see that when GLUT is not installed, there's a fallback for building
without -DHAVE_VER. It would be nice to have an option to disable this
part even when GLUT is installed. For now, I have patched Makefile.PL
for this.

We also want to build with the system GL headers, not the ones distributed
with the OpenGL-0.56 tarball. This is pretty much working when building
without -DHAVE_VER; the only problem I have found is in glut_util.h,
which unconditionally includes "./include/GL/glut.h". This should probably
look at HAVE_VER too.

The most important reason to build with the system headers is that have a
license problem with the header files in include/GL. The SGI Free Software
License B and the GLX Public License are not considered free by Debian,
mostly because of the 'Claims of Infringement' sections. Details can be
found in Debian bug #368560:

 http://bugs.debian.org/368560 

and the mailing list thread it refers to, starting at

 http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200309/msg00723.html

The fact that files with this license have entered Debian in the past
by accident doesn't make it OK for us to knowingly include more of them.
This is not a showstopper, though: we can build with the system headers
and distribute a repackaged tarball that is purged from the problematic
files. This is quite standard practice, but we would certainly be
happier if we didn't have to do this. Is there any chance that you could
distribute a tarball without these header files? They weren't present
in 0.54.

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 11:38:38PM -0700, Bob Free wrote:
 
> BTW - the OpenGL::Image and OpenGL::Shader modules are designed to work in 
> conjunction withthe OpenGL module - so you might want to bundle them all 
> together in the next opengl-perl package.

Since they are separated upstream, it makes sense to provide them in
separate Debian packages too. I'll file an ITP (Intent To Package)
on libopengl-image-perl and libopengl-shader-perl soon and prepare the
packages (unless somebody else beats me to it.)

One more thing: in case you'd like to receive Debian bug reports and
notifications of updates to the package, you can subscribe to the package
information at <http://packages.qa.debian.org/libopengl-perl>. Of course,
we will forward any bug reports not related to the Debian packaging
itself in any case.

Again, thanks for your help and your work on the OpenGL modules.

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at iki.fi