ITP: libglvnd -- Vendor-neutral OpenGL dispatch layer

[Luca Boccassi]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com>

* Package name    : libglvnd
  Version         : 0~20160122
  Upstream Author : NVIDIA Corporation
* URL             : https://github.com/NVIDIA/libglvnd
* License         : MIT
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : Vendor-neutral OpenGL dispatch layer

libglvnd is a Vendor-neutral dispatch layer for arbitrating OpenGL API
calls between multiple vendors on a per-screen basis.
Currently, only the GLX window-system API and OpenGL are supported, but
in the future this library may support EGL and OpenGL ES as well.


I am one of the pkg-nvidia maintainers, and we would like to use this
ITP to start a discussion about packaging libglvnd with the maintainers
of Mesa, X and fglrx.

As you might have read news about, NVIDIA has been working on an open
source (MIT-like license) vendor-neutral dispatch layer for OpenGL. They
have now declared it stable, and their proprietary graphics driver
started using it in version 361 [1].

It has been reported that AMD is interested in supporting this library
too [2].

Finally, following a discussion on the upstream Mesa mailing list [3],
it has been reported that work is in progress in Mesa too to support
this library [4].

Our proposal would be to wait to upload this package until a version of
Mesa that can make use of it is released. Then, as a a possible example,
we could upload both to Debian experimental, and at the same time switch
the proprietary Nvidia drivers to use it, and see how it works. When
fglrx gets there too, we should then be able to stop using
glx-alternatives-* packages.

My proposal for the packaging itself can be found on pkg-nvidia's git
[5]. Given upstream doesn't seem to do release tagging, I'm using the
0~<LAST-COMMIT-DATE> format. I split each .so in an individual binary
and -dbg package, called *-glvnd[-dbg], plus a common libglvnd-dev.
Figuring out precisely the licensing was the fun part, as the code is a
mixture of Expat, MIT-like, BSD 1-clause and 3-clause, GPL3 and
GNU-permissive :-)

Comments? Opinions? ACKs/NACKs?

Kind regards,
Luca Boccassi

[1] https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/908423
[2]
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Looking-At-GLVND
[3]
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2015-September/095856.html
[4]
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Will-Do-GLVND
[5] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-nvidia/libglvnd.git
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