In article <39621f2d@news.povray.org> , "Thorsten Froehlich" 
<tho### [at] trfde> wrote:

> For now we have to deal with releasing POV-Ray 3.5.  Once the rewrite
> happens with POV-Ray 4.0, POV-Ray will surely again most (if not all) of the
> frequently requested features.

More more thing regarding the long time between releases:

When POV-Ray 3.1 we could have said we just take the next three years or so,
develop a completely new POV-Ray and there won't be any releases in the mean
time.  We did not do this because of the users of POV-Ray.  The idea was and
still is that many, many users do not need all the features at once and are
not willing to wait for them three years or more.  POV-Ray 3.5 will be one
intermediate step between a giant leap: POV-Ray 4.0.

Continuity is one major point here.  Take XFree (the free X-Windows server,
i.e. used with Linux) for example.  There has also been a redesign with
version 4.0 (this is coincidence of course).  It took many years from XFree
3.x to 4.0 and 3.x was actively developed while 4.0 was in development.

There are many people working on XFree.  It is not always a matter of the
number of people working on a project (actually, software engineering
experts have observed the contrary in many, if not all cases - too many
developers can make matters much worse due to communication overhead), it is
also the general complexity of a program in the size of POV-Ray that cannot
be eliminated and it simply takes at least two years for a major step.

Look at Windows 95, 98, 98 SE and 98 ME for example.  Surely Microsoft can
hire as many developers as many can buy, yet, a complex project simply takes
time even with all the money (no or very few resource limits) and a monopoly
(no or very little market pressure you need to consider).


Oh, and as Ken pointed to my post in povray.windows, the number of people
talented in both, programming and graduate level math, is small.

There are also people who have the knowledge and time to work on POV-Ray but
who already work for a company making a similar (meaning a renderer,
raytracer, modeller) commercial product which does not allow them to do
similar work outside the company they work for.


     Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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