About the extension registry ...

It would be nice if the extensions could/would be sorted by date.
The numbering might be interesting (for whatever reason) to extension developers, but rather uninteresting for users…

Right now it takes a lot of work to figure out which extension is older, and which ones are brand new.

Ordering them by date should make it easier for new people.

… in fact, categorizing the extensions (somehow) would make the registry even more usable …

Well, more of less the extension are sorted by date thanks to the numbering.

More or less, yes.
But since enumerations are assigned to a vendor in blocks there really is no guarantee for that.
It would be nice to bring some more clarity to the extension list through sorting etc. because it’s getting rather big and it’ll only get bigger as time goes on.
Which might be fine as long as you keep up with the latest extensions, but for new users it’s simply a huge mess.

There is no link between enumerations assignment and extension numbering.

There is for sure a lake of documentation but I don’t how sorting by date would improved anything. You want to use new feature … use extension with a big number …

Extensions are created with some purposes based on needs. I don’t think having a look on shiny and extension is appropriate for new comers.

Maybe what you expect is something to deal with modern OpenGL practice, where is this lake of documentation.

Really? That’s odd.

Looking at the dates in the extensions themselves there seems to be no strong correlation between what position it is in the list, when it was written and when it was actually released to the public.

I suppose the “useful for newcomers” argument isn’t a very strong one. But I think at the very least it would make it easier to keep track of new extensions being released, sorting is a rather trivial thing to implement.

A somewhat tangential issue, but it would also be nice to have a version indicator for the .spec files. I recall that older specs used to include a revision number (around the 2.0-2.1 era), but the latest specs do not have it anymore.

We need this to know when to sync our bindings with the official specs.

I don’t see how sorting by date would help the newcommer. Most of the extension there are dead/useless/too old to be used by anyone anymore. There should be a “young” list. I attempted to that over at http://www.opengl.org/wiki/OpenGL_extensions, at the bottom.
Feel free to edit it to your own liking in order to help the newcommers.

Yep, doesn’t take but a handful of extension to get GL up and running on modern hardware.

While I think at one time or another we’ve all probably at least entertained the idea that a filter or 2 would come in handy, the bottom line is invariably and inextricably this: who’s going to maintain it? Vman’s suggestion is a good one - the wiki if fertile ground for all sorts of conveniences like this. The community needs to get busy making life easier for the rest of us :wink: