[Development] The Dynamic OpenGL on Windows Change

[Sean Harmer]

Hi Friedemann,

On 27/02/2014 15:42, Friedemann Kleint wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the intention was here to pave to way for a software renderer for
> platforms that have no GL at all (virtual machines,  remote logins, etc,
> see https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-36091 ).

Is this not trying to solve the problem at the wrong level? This sounds 
like it would be better resolved as a system configuration/deployment 
approach by having those systems use mesa's llvmpipe opengl32.dll as the 
OpenGL implementation rather than trying to solve it from within Qt itself.

> The initial versions of https://codereview.qt-project.org/#change,76732
> had a separate QOpenGLProxy module, but we decided to move it into
> Qt5Gui since otherwise the user would have to deploy yet another
> library. But having a separate module would not help in the scenario you
> described (3rd party renderer of some sort e.g. VTK, OpenSceneGraph...),
> either?

How does this change help with that? Is it on the assumption that any 
software renderer would be limited to OpenGL ES 2? And I think yes we 
could still end up with a mess with conflicting symbols. Only the 
application developer knows what they need and what their other 
dependencies are. I'm not sure we can solve this particular problem 
within Qt or should even be trying to do so for fear of backing 
ourselves into a corner in the future. Maybe I'm missing something that 
everybody else sees though?

Cheers,

Sean

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