Article on wine development strategy

[Ben Klein]

2009/4/19 Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:31 AM, Remco <remco47 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 11:36 PM, Henri Verbeet <hverbeet at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 2009/4/18 Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>:
>>>>
>>>> Right now, there's one thing bugging me: bug 14939. If Dan (or others)
>>>> would like to implement a method of deferring S3TC texture
>>>> decompression to the appropriately licensed GPU, assuming there are no
>>>> legal issues with this, I'd be ecstatic. But I'm sure the D3D devs
>>>> have better things to do. :)
>>>>
>>> The sad thing is that S3TC decompression is just plain trivial.
>>
>> Maybe that could be solved in the same way as the patented Freetype
>> code: disable it by default, but let commercial Wine packagers (and
>> individual users obviously) have the choice of compiling it in.
>> Something like ./configure --paid-for-patents.
>
> Most drivers offer it these days and I believe also Mesa by default
> but you need to enable it using driconf or so.

If you read the bug report, you'll see the app is not trying to load
an S3TC, but it's asking DirectX and/or video driver to convert an
DXTC texture to ARGB. If it was just loading an S3TC/DXTC texture, I
wouldn't have a problem because my card and drivers support it (closed
nVidia drivers). This is something that needs to be implemented in
Wine somehow, even if it defers decoding to the GPU to do it.