[Bf-committers] proposal: OpenGL cleanup in master

[Antony Riakiotakis]

You have my sword. And my axe. And my bow.
I could trickle some free time on this, though not terribly much unfortunately.

I definitely vote to do this on master/or current full dev branch (2.8
branch?) when that changes. The previous approach of dumping chunks of
code in a big branch that will code-rot as soon as time or energy
dries out just does not work for such a big project in my opinion. We
need an approach that will let us work on this incrementally.

We should communicate well, with screams, on the street to
unsuspecting pedestrians and on the net to unsuspecting surfers, posts
on blender.org, in the manual and with ugly message boxes with bright
flashing red letters (OK, I admit that might be pushing it a little
bit), especially for the windows and mac people, that system
requirements are now raised to 2.1, and add the relevant checks and
warnings in GHOST to ensure that people who try to use blender without
it, cannot do so anymore. Current approach on Windows is just spawning
a warning messagebox. We can leave that in but also quit blender in
case it does not meet our requirements, and also expand to a similar
approach for other OSs.

On 21/11/2015, Mike Erwin <significant.bit at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> I was responding to something in bf-viewport but could use a wider set of
> people to either agree or put a stop to this madness before it's too late.
> :)
>
> I'd like to start basic GL cleanup in master ASAP. By this I mean set GL
> 2.1 as a baseline and convert all code that uses obsolete extensions to the
> functions/enums provided by GL itself. Much of this is simply deleting ARB
> or EXT, and removing checks for GL features that are guaranteed in 2.1. No
> new features, no major rewriting, just get the code up to spec and ready to
> branch for the bigger GL 3.2 upgrade.
>
> Staged migration of OpenGL:
> now --> GL 2.1 (all platforms, soon)
> --> 3.2 compatibility profile (Windows & Linux)
> --> 3.2 core profile (all platforms, in time for Blender 2.8)
>
> That final transition will be the most work. The first transition can be
> done NOW and doesn't involve any design really -- just a plan of what to
> remove/convert. Dropping support for GL 1.4, 1.5 and 2.0 in one swoop will
> let us clean up a lot of legacy crap without raising the hardware bar.
>
> Is anyone opposed to this? Anyone eager to help?
>
> Mike Erwin
> musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>