On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 19:50:06 GMT, povray.org admin team 
	<new### [at] DESPAMpovrayorg> wrote:
>"Matthew Bennett" <ben### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:
>
>>Grr...  I know this have been brought up before, but why can't POV accept
>>dlls to add new features to it, like Moray? Yes, I know they're platform
>>specific - but it would be great if this ability could be added even just to
>>the Windows version.  Yeah, sure - I suppose they'd be quite a technical
>
>it's not just technical. just imagine what it would be like if we started to
>have scene files floating around that depended on a particular mod being
>loaded. it'd fragment POV's standard, work-on-any-platform scene language
>into a bunch of platform-specific dialects.

As if that problem weren't already pretty severe with all the various 
patches out there.  If the cross-platform and other portability issues 
were resolved, though, I can see where the plugin concept would cause 
less of this problem than does the current system - especially if there
were a more-or-less centralized repository for plugins and if they were
required to be covered under either POVLEGAL or an Open Source license 
of some form.

At least with plugins, or the underlying architecture they'd require, 
adding most new unofficial features would be easier than modifying the 
current minimum of three files[1], if you should happen to need to 
recompile the plugin for your OS.  Having been through the process of 
merging sometimes-incompatible unofficial features[2] more times than 
I care to count, I can testify that it's often much more difficult than 
modifying a handful of files.  It shouldn't have to be that hard to
just add a new object, function, or texture.

[1] parse.h, [parse|parstxtr|express].c, tokenize.c
[2] and some official ones - most of the patches in the Superpatch 
    were originally written for version 3.0x and were originally 
    merged with that source base, so I merged in version 3.1 as if 
    it were just another patch.

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