advice reqd. on packaging vtk for linux

[Ken Martin]

>         There exist two configuration options for the OpenGL library,
>--with-opengl and --with-mesa.  Now, most linux users use Mesa, and
>vtk does make use of mesa specific features like the OSMesa*
>functions.  My question is, since Mesa is "like" OpenGL, what will
>happen if I were to compile vtk with --with-opengl (after adding the
>necessary path and libs to the configure script) while using the Mesa
>libs?  Or are there things that OGL does that Mesa just cant do (which
>vtk makes use of)?
>
>         The reason I ask this is because, on one machine which has a
>Riva TNT2, the GL libs (for XFree86 3.3.5) are provided by nVidia and
>these do not have some of the Mesa functions, specifically the OSMesa
>stuff.  If standard opengl is merely a subset of Mesa then shouldnt it
>be easier to just compile for opengl and link it to Mesa?  This way I
>wouldnt have to build both packages (one with opengl the other with
>mesa).

The safe thing to do is use --with-opengl (no mesa) and link it against 
-lGL as a shared library.  Our use of opengl is a subset of our use of 
mesagl. So compiling opengl and using a mesa shared library should work 
fine. If you try to use both on Linux you will run into problems because 
many accelerated OpenGL libraries use mesa internal functions which would 
conflict with the normal mesa library (even with mesa's name mangling 
turned on)

- Ken



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