Well, it's just as difficult to know that now. The only indication you 
get in this particular instance is when installation breaks, because of 
the reasons outlined above. The POV-Ray 'bug' was discovered two days 
ago, when people realized that povray-3.50c was out, but only because of 
the installation script failing, but if I am not mistaken it has been 
out for a couple of months now?
   IMHO, it's better to have a slightly outdated version in a particular 
distribution that _always_ works, then the maintainers of the 
distribution specific package can monitor minor releases and bugfixes on 
the POV site and releasing a new package with the new version to the 
users when they are ready.
   I suppose major releases will have more prominent announcements, 
which are easier to track, and does not confuse anyone.
   But even for minor bugfixes, an announcement on the www.povray.org 
website when a new source release is available would suffice, or a 
message on povray.announce
   People (like me) watches POV-Ray pretty closely, and even if there 
are no announcements updates would be discovered anyway.

   Now I understand that you all do this on your free time, and it is 
greatly appreciated, but would the POV team please at least take the 
aforementioned suggestion under consideration? It would be a big help to 
both users and maintainers of distribution packages of POV-Ray for 
different platforms?

   And with symlinks, it would be possible to have the best of both worlds!

   I won't bug you anymore, but... can we have it, please? :-)

Humbly,



Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> <pae### [at] kmstudiosystemscom>  wrote:
> 
> 
>>   I'll suggest to the Gentoo people that they change the name of the
>>source file to an unambiguos 'povray-3.50c.tar.gz', but I think it would
>>be a nice service from the POV team to do this as well. :-)
> 
> 
> To the contrary, because you would then download an outdated version and
> never know that a more recent version is available.
> 
>     Thorsten
> 
> ____________________________________________________
> Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
> e-mail: tho### [at] trfde
> 
> Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message