Nvidia packaging in Fedora (Summary)

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 13:46:55 -0700, Ivan Gyurdiev <ivg2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> Why do you keep saying that Nvidia's does not count.
> What exactly is the problem with their GL headers/library?

nvidia's implements their own extentions to opengl.  If you build an
application against nvidia's headers and libraries it will most likely
not work against other opengl implementations such as mesa.  You end
up compiling programs that need nvidia's libs... and that's burned a
few community packagers in the past using system with nvidia drivers
installed via nvidia's installer and then trying to hand those
packages over to people using non-nvidia hardware.  A fun time was had
by all. If you compile against the mesa opengl headers and libs... you
can run those applications with nvidia's implementation via runtime
detection of the nvidia libraries.

But don't take my word for it.. take a some opengl opensource apps and
build them using the nvidia headers and libraries.. package them up...
give it to someone who runs accelerated non-nvidia 3d hardware and
watch as those apps  breaks on the non-nvidia hardware.

-jef"i guess there is a reason why history is doomed to repeat itself"spaleta