[vtk-developers] Proposal: deprecating Cg/GLSL XML shader framework

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Folks,

Scanning the VTK 6 backwards incompatible changes got me thinking of
other legacy code that should be removed and the first thing that
poped up in my mind was the XMLShader framework we added to VTK to
support Cg and GLSL shaders on vtkProperty. The framework is outdated
and clunky. A newer set of classes for GLSL shader support (using
vtkShader2 -- maybe we could fix this name as well) was added later
and most code uses/should use that.

Hence I propose we deprecate/remove the XML Shader framework for VTK
6. The classes include:
- vtkXMLShader
- vtkXMLMaterial
- vtkShader (vtkCgShader, vtkGLSLShader)
- vtkShaderProgram (vtkCgShaderProgram, vtkGLSLShaderProgram)
- vtkShaderDeviceAdaptor (vtkCgShaderDeviceAdaptor, vtkGLSLShaderDeviceAdaptor)

Thoughts?

Utkarsh