Thorsten Froehlich schrieb in Nachricht <36e58fcc.0@news.povray.org>...
>In article <36e5113f.0@news.povray.org> , "Rudy Velthuis"
><rve### [at] gmxnet> wrote:

>Well, the team is based on CompuServe, its our official _home_ and you can
>get access to it (of course, CompuServe takes money for it...).
>And these newsgroups are no official team support area (see
>http://www.povray.org/groups.html), the CompuServe POVRAY forum is.

This is the *internal* Team support area. But can you consider it the
offical *public* POV-Ray site? I see that a bit different.

>A lot of (often repeated) reasons:
>- This is (usually) out hobby.
>- CompuServe is the home of the team.
>- CompuServe provides the forum, the team gives something in return: Users
>visiting and downloading from it. If no users come to the forum, there
won't
>be a forum much longer...
>- Making a _lot_ of different versions available (some are still 3.02, some
>3.1a, some 3.1d and others 3.1e) increases the time needed for support.
>- Updating the web for each version is some work, and doing so for each
>version update that is ready is even more work.
>- It is not just recompiling! The docs need to be updated, some basic
>testing needs to be done, the archives need to be prepared and tested, etc,
>etc...


At least now I know why it takes so long sometimes <g>. Thanks for the
explanation. I understand your reasons (the best one being it's a hobby and
it's free), but I just wanted to point out the feelings of most users, as I
see them. To most people, www.povray.org is the official site, as that's the
only one they (can) see. So to them, an official release is the one that
appears at that site. That was what I wanted to explain in my post, mainly.

I understand you must do some testing, but I don't see why a bug fix in the
bump map code must be tested on all platforms. This is the core engine, not
the front-end. I also understand that maintaining and constantly updating a
web page is a problem.

Thanks for your reply! And keep up the good work!
--
Rudy Velthuis

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