Glean https://sourceforge.net/projects/glean/
Going solely by the documentation on that page, Glean is not a project that should be “supported” in any way. They can’t even be bothered to make actual releases, forcing you instead to download from CVS. Their documentation is ancient, asking MSVC users to use STLPort (which hasn’t been updated in 2.5 years. And we’re long past the days when VC++'s STL implementation had problems), needlessly requires a simple external library that could have been included in the distro (libtiff), etc.
This feels, in every way, like the worst aspects of Open Source development. That UNIX-ian philosophy of make everything as needlessly difficult for the user as possible.
I’d much rather the ARB hire someone to just do it the right way.
For stable I meant specification, it keeps changing and follow it is just good for few people really into it. The (many) others are like “what?” and barely goes beyond shaders. To generalize modern OpenGL programming, I think we need more stability but better documentation, better drivers and better programmers (we need to learn too!)
Of course the spec keeps changing; they keep adding new things. Do you want them to stop?
Also, the ARB has no control whatsoever on any of the three points you mention. Well, they do have the “man” pages, but that’s reference documentation and doesn’t always tell the whole story.
Then OpenGL doesn’t expose everything so I think it needs to continue to evolve but in a way that the paradigm doesn’t drastically after a specification update. OpenGL 4.1 as basically no OpenGL 4 hardware features but the API and its use as changed a lot with the separate program stuff.
The paradigm didn’t change at all for 4.1. If you wanted to use program separation, it was there. But it’s not like they were saying you have to use it.
Also, that’s what you have to do when you’re playing catch-up because you’ve consistently failed for a good 3-4 years to get important changes implemented in the spec. By all rights, ARB_separate_program_objects shouldn’t even be necessary; that should have been taken care of when everyone hated having to link their program back before GL 2.0. But no; the all-knowing ARB decided to stick with 3DLabs’s idiotic linking paradigm. The same goes with things like sampler_objects, DSA (this should have been done back when we saw how badly multitexture, itself already needlessly convoluted, interacted with shaders) and the like.
The ARB made many such mistakes. And they still haven’t corrected all of them. And looking at the ARB_separate_program_objects spec, you can see that they’ve made more.
Until they do, there will be many such “paradigm shifts”. Or would you rather not have ARB_separate_program_objects at all?