[Fresco-devel] Fresco::Mesh

I'm interested in changing one of the types defined in Fresco/Types.idl.
Fresco::Mesh represents an object model in three-space in terms of a set 
  of vertices, triangles made out of those vertices, and an optional set 
of normals for each triangle to help define lighting.

I'd like to add another element to this struct which specifies whether 
the model is solid or just a shell. This would affect rendering of the 
model when alpha-blended, such that the backsize wouldn't be rendered if 
it were solid. (Imagine looking at a semi-transparent cube. In "solid" 
mode you would see only the near corner, while in "shell" mode you would 
see both near and far corners. There are cases in 3d programming when 
you need either of these, though it's not too obvious why.)

At the moment we don't use Fresco::Mesh for any sort of intersection, 
picking, or hit detection so there's no need to change any code to 
handle the shell/solid distinction. If were are to ever do intersection 
testing with Meshes, a figure entirely contained within a "shell" Mesh 
should be considered non-intersecting, while it would be intersecting a 
  "solid" Mesh with the same vertices.

Can I have an opinion from the powers-that-be about making this change 
to the core API? (Further, should we have a formalized process for 
changing the public API bits? I like the idea just so that in the future 
we have the mailing list thread to refer to.)

Nick Lewycky