3Dfx DRI support, Glide3, and you

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Alan Cox wrote:

>> Essentially, Glide3 source code is rather insane, compiler picky, 
>> and gcc barfs on it nowadays.  It was unmaintained upstream for 2 
>> years, but we kept it because "it worked".  Now, "it doesn't 
>> work", and is a zero-priority level package basically.
>
>It is maintained upstream curently.

Daniel Borca and a few others rekindled Glide3, and eliminated 
the h3 lib.  Supposedly all hardware works on the h5 lib now, 
and they've worked on it for quite a while, however it seems to 
have gone stale again now.

I orignally planned on updating to the new sources however the 
build instructions included with the source no longer work as 
written.  Couldn't find an alternate document present and so 
moved on.  I really do not have a lot of time to dedicate to 
obsolete hardware support, even if I'd like to actually do it.  
Playing with the new Glide3 has been on my TODO list for over 6 
months.  Only now I'm realizing that it isn't going to happen as 
that list isn't getting shorter, and higher priority things are 
going on it at least once a week.

That's why I decided to post here to see if anyone else is 
personally interested in getting their own fingers dirty.  It's 
not that I'm not interested, but rather that it isn't a priority 
to me when stacked up against all other priorities, and so it 
isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

>> not interested in becoming the upstream maintainer.  That said, 
>> there are upstream people still working on Glide, however there 
>> are some "issues" with switching to the new code, including the 
>> fact it's never been widely deployed or tested yet.
>
>I have voodoo setups but I use the Mandrake X servers on them because
>of RH limitations and lack of Glide2 packages. I can maybe take a look
>at the Glide3 bits during FC2 at least I can test them

If you're volunteering to put together a Glide2 rpm and maintain
it in the distribution now, just notting to add the component in
beehive, and dkl to add it in bugzilla.  ;o)  Let me know when
it's built in rawhide and I will toggle the BuildVoodoo define in
the XFree86.spec file to 1, and you wont need to use Mandrake's X
server anymore.  ;o)

I recommend making the package "Exclusivearch: %{ix86}" or else 
you'll have to wait 3 hours for it to compile on s390.  ;o)

Adding Glide2 was another one of those low priority TODO list 
items that never made it up the priority list.  However the more 
people willing to volunteer for stuff like this, the better we 
are able to support older/obsolete hardware if people really want 
it to be present, so I'm totally in favour of other people's 
contributions.

Back to the Glide3 thing though...  The time and effort required 
to update to the new Glide3 and get it going is probably not much 
different from the time needed to get the old one we have now 
compiling once again.  Since the old one hasn't had bug reports 
in ages, and the new one is not widely used, I favoured keeping 
th old one until I had time to allocate to actually using the new 
one.  Since that time never seems to come, my request for someone 
interested to come forward and get Glide3 working again can be 
extended to be either Glide3 - the old one or the new one.  They 
needn't own the package, I'll still own it for now, but I wont 
have time to look into it with the pile of stuff I have on my 
plate right now, and with everything that is occuring in the 
XFree86 community right now.



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat