[sldev] [VIEWER] OpenGL clipping in the GUI

[Lawson English]

Ryan Williams (Which) wrote:
> Lawson English wrote:
>   
>> ALl that aside, Cairo, DOES seem like a good thing to use. What
>> specifically have been reasons why the LIndens aren't interested? Lack
>> of resources? Lack of experience? Time and energy already spent on a
>> different system?
>>
>> What does using Cairo give them that using OpenGL doesn't? Pango
>> text-handlign  is a separate issue, according to the website hype...
>>     
> All of the above, plus Cairo wasn't mature until very recently (read:
> less than four years ago).  Shit, we still have our container classes
> from pre-STL days, as you may recall.  It's really hard to justify
> replacing an entire subsystem with another, given that different
> subsystems are causing grid-wide problems and need to be fixed
> yesterday.  :-)
>
> I love Cairo, FWIW.
>   
I don't see that using Cairo gains anything over raw OpenGL calls at 
this point. Pango would be another issue, but last I read it wasn't 
mature on Macs, which is silly, given that Apple was a major investor in 
Adobe, launched the DTP industry, etc., so a cross-platform 
text-handling system that cant work on Macs is a joke in my eyes.

Assuming that Pango works equally well on all three OS's, I'd vote for 
using it to replace what SL uses currently.

The clip-rect issue should be fixable, but I'm not sure how easily. My 
*intuition* suggests that fixing it at the lowest level of the 
framework-hierarchy should percolate throughout the entire hierarchy 
with minimal rewrites, but, in every case thus far, my intuition about 
the SL framework has been proven horribly wrong.

Every single case.

:-(