Nieminen Juha wrote:
> 
>   I was looking through Ken's links and ended up in this page:
> http://www.io.com/~wwagner/pov.html
> 
>   I would want to seriously warn about this #exec patch (specially
> because povray 3.5 might include it).
> 
>   Povray is currently quite safe to use. You can download a .pov file and
> render it with povray and the only harm it can do is to create an image
> file. It just can't do anything else. You can safely render a 10000 lines
> long pov file without having to worry about what does it contain.


 Anyone of you programmers could easily build a malicious program,
call it a povray utility, and there is nothing keeping you from
causing irreparable damage to someone else's system if they use
it. One can only hope that no one will ever produce such a utility
but the possibility is there. You must also have the same faith you
have in any software you try that something similar won't be tried
by a "malicious" pov scene designer.

  Even considering the harm that it can do also think of the
possibilities. It adds a whole new avenue to external processes
that are impossible to do now with simple Pov script. One such
use would be calls to the system clock for true random animation
scene development. Other possibilities would be calling external
executables that have pov scene output, passing it command line
parameters from inside pov, and then parse the file it produced.
It would save a lot of steps if you could do all of your development
work from within Pov without having to operate outside the scene
editing environment.

 I'm not saying your concerns are invalid but the benefits would
likewise be enormous.

-- 
Ken Tyler -  1100+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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