Nigel Stewart wrote:

>         I've been giving this some thought today, pondering the
>         technicalities as well the unexpected hysteria generated
>         on povray.general and the IMP list.  Every day I go to
>         work improving a software product, trying to deliver the
>         features that users are asking for.  I get a lot of
>         satisfaction from finding elegant, robust and user
>         friendly solutions to new problems.  But, in the context
>         of povray, the mere suggestion of some kind of paradigm
>         shift seems to upset people very quickly.

   If you take into consideration the 1000's of people that have tens of
1000's of hours vested in this program I think it is entirely acceptable
that they would question radical change.
 

>         If there are other people who find these
>         possibilities attractive, I would be interested
>         in developing a more detailed proposal.  Some
>         aspects would require interaction with the
>         POV team, or the TAG people - but I think it's
>         fair to present them with more than a
>         "we think XML is funky idea" or have them
>         sift through threads of conceptual development
>         and hysterical backlash.


  Speaking as a TAG member I will offer this advice. If you can get other
people excited about your ideas, and between you draft a concrete proposal,
I would be happy to present it to the POV-Team on your behalf for their
consideration. It would really help if you could figure out a way to make
all of us understand the ramifications of your proposal, and get us excited
about it, but if you are sure it has merit I/we will not stand in your way.

What you need to bring to the table -

1. Detail your proposal as far as functionality and purpose.

2. Describe in detail what advantages your proposal has over the current
   system.

3. Who benefits from the changes or additions of your proposal.

4. Try to give some indication of how difficult it will be to implement
   and what kind of language support will be needed to make it portable
   to all platforms that POV-Ray currently supports.


  Remember that if you cannont get other people here excited about your
proposal there is little likelihood the POV-Team will get excited about
it. Also remember that timing may be everything. Right now the POV-Team
is actively working on finalizing the release of POV-Ray v3.5 which for
all intents and purposes should be considered feature locked at this time.
This means from the POV-Team's point of view any action they might take
towards your proposal will have to wait for their planned C++ re-write
for POV-Ray v4.0. As far as I know the POV-Team has not entered into
any detailed discussions on what changes will be made in v4.0, other
than the move to C++, and it is likely they will want to have their own
data structure decided before accepting additional suggestions in this
regard. Their internal discussions will likely be sometime down the
road when the release of POV-Ray v3.5 has been made public and they have
had a chance to hammer the public reported bugs out of it.


Keep this in mind...

What you are proposing may actually be better suited for a dedicated
patch of the program rather than something the mainstream POV-Ray user
will be interested in having in the official version of the program.


-- 
Ken Tyler -  1300+ Povray, Graphics, 3D Rendering, and Raytracing Links:
http://home.pacbell.net/tylereng/index.html http://www.povray.org/links/

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