man pages for GLUT?

Jonathan Berry berryja at gmail.com
Sun Feb 26 21:25:30 UTC 2006


On 2/26/06, Mike A. Harris <mharris at mharris.ca> wrote:
> Jonathan Berry wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Does anyone know why there are no man pages included for GLUT in the
> > freeglut (or freeglut-devel) package?
>
> Because the freeglut tarball does not contain any manpages.
>
> > My school has some version of SuSE running on the computers that we
>  > do OpenGL development on.  The SuSE version of the freeglut rpms has
>  > the man pages (specifially, they are in the freeglut-devel rpm).
>
> I haven't looked at the SuSE freeglut rpm, however the freeglut source
> code does not have any manpages, so there are none installed.  If SuSE
> wrote manpages for freeglut, I would hope that they would submit them
> back to the freeglut project, as that would be the right thing to do.
>
> One way to find out would be for you to download the SuSE freeglut
> src.rpm and install it to see where the manpages come from.  If they
> come from the official GLUT sources however, then they're under the
> same license for GLUT, which is not OSS, and not something that can
> be included in Fedora Core.
>
> > I've noticed that there is some HTML documentation included with the
>  > Fedora rpm, but nothing quite as helpful as man pages.  If there
>  > are not any licencing issues with the man pages (could there be?),
>  > would it be possible for the Fedora rpms to include these?
>  > I have no idea where they come from.
>
> If there are GLUT manpages which are licensed under a proper OSI
> approved OSS license, once the author of them submits them to the
> freeglut project, they will probably appear in a future release of
> freeglut.
>
> Study the SuSE src.rpm and determine where the manpages they allegedly
> ship actually come from, and try to find a license for them.
>
> Another option is for someone to volunteer to write manpages for
> freeglut from scratch and submit them to the freeglut project.

Well, after some digging, this is what I have found out.  The
freeglut-2.4.0-4.src.rpm from (Open) SuSE 10 (can be found here:
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/suse/src/
) contains a glutman.tar.bz2 with the GLUT man pages.  I could find
nothing that indicated where the man pages came from.  Some google
work turned up a site from SGI which had "freeware" packages on it,
including a GLUT package.  It appears the man pages have been
extracted from the glut-3.7.tar.gz source tarball from this site:
http://freeware.sgi.com/source/  I have not been able to find anything
that looks definitive on a license.  The best I could find is the
NOTICE file in the glut-3.7.tar.gz tarball:

NOTICE:  The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) distribution contains source
code published in a book titled "Programming OpenGL for the X Window
System" (ISBN: 0-201-48359-9) published by Addison-Wesley.  The
programs and associated files contained in the distribution were
developed by Mark J. Kilgard and are Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 by Mark
J. Kilgard (unless otherwise noted).  The programs are not in the
public domain, but they are freely distributable without licensing
fees.  These programs are provided without guarantee or warrantee
expressed or implied.

Apparently, OpenSuSE feels they can include these man pages with their
freeglut package.  Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Jonathan




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