Upcoming Qt switch to OpenGL ES on arm64

[Scott Kitterman]

On Saturday, November 24, 2018 08:36:11 PM bret curtis wrote:
> > > There are more than 5 million Raspberry Pis were sold as of February
> > > 2015.
> > > All of them with a VC4 GPU, Raspbian ships with the VC4 mesa driver
> > > enabled!
> > > 
> > > I'm of the opinion that the switch away from Desktop OpenGL to GLES was
> > > a
> > > huge mistake and should be reversed as soon as possible unless there is
> > > a
> > > way to provide for both on all archtictures.
> > 
> > Well, f you can prove this for armhf and/or armel, we can certainly do it.
> 
> The Raspberry Pi is armhf. What would you like me to prove? Sadly I
> can't help you with armel, but with armhf, according to some sources
> the number of RPi's sold in the last 5 years is 12 million [1].
> Admidetly, not all of them will be used as a desktop, but it is still
> nothing to sneeze at and it is shame that we've had to prevent
> compiling OpenMW on armhf and armel just because Qt was compiled
> against GLES. We've had to introduce "libqt5opengl5-dev,
> libqt5opengl5-desktop-dev [armel armhf]" in the debian/control file as
> a result. [2] This makes sure that OpenMW can't ever be built on on
> armel and armhf with "BD-Uninstallable". [3]
> 
> openmw build-depends on missing:
> - libqt5opengl5-desktop-dev:armhf
> ^-- sad state of affairs that this even exists!

We have a Rasberry Pi working as a desktop here at my house.  It's quite 
usable as long as you only try to do a few things at a time, but it's not by 
any means zippy.  I strongly suspect that moving back from GLES would move it 
from "reasonable for limited use" to "pointless".  Please don't do anything to 
make things even slower.

Scott K