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Re: [ITP] OpenSceneGraph-2.8.1-1


(I hope not to break the threading. I just unsubscribed from this list
some days ago and just found Yaakov's reply to my mail by pure luck in
the archives, so I'm using the mail provided by the archive.)

First of all, I have to tell you, Yaakov, that I do really appreciate
the effort you have taken in order to test and build the port of
OSG. By the way, I have to say that I think that the cygport system is
pretty amazing and fun to use, even I didn't knew that it had a
devoted CMake package until I saw your .cygport!

Now the sad part. My motivation when I offered to maintain the OSG
package for Cygwin was based on:

* A desire of helping newbies with the building of the library, since
  it has many dependencies that sometimes -- as you noticed -- are not
  available on mainstream Cygwin. I have seen a lot of messages in OSG
  mailing list about people that are new to Cygwin and mistakenly try
  to mix X and Windows GL headers and things like that. Having OSG as
  a Cygwin package would ease a lot the installation for them.

* Promoting Cygwin as another valid development platform on Windows
  for 3D real time applications. No need to say that it *always* has
  been, but IMHO it would be a big point for attracting new
  developers.

I really like X, but the issue here is the acceleration. Not having
acceleration will make the Cygwin port a second class citizen, with
the following consequences:

* A huge increase of support demand on OSG mailing list with topics
  like "Why my applications {are so slow, don't work with the latest
  card features} in Cygwin when they were fine on the rest of the
  platforms?" The standard answer to that kind of questions would be
  to ask the users to compile OSG by themselves with the native
  driver, beating the purpose of the package.

* This also could lead to a false sensation of slowness or lack of
  performance of Cygwin and OSG which would harm both projects.

I think packaging this library without acceleration is a bad
move. Take in mind that programs using OSG usually try to push the
hardware to its limits (real time earth-sized database rendering, use
of shader programming on the GPU...) so a fully software version could
not even reach by far the level of performance required. Sadly, it's
an all or nothing issue.

As I said, I really understand that official Cygwin packages should
make use of UNIX interfaces, it's a coherent rule. That's why I think
that it's not the time yet for OSG to be part of Cygwin :)

Thank you very much for your time,

Alberto


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