In article <Xns### [at] 204213191226> , Tom Galvin 
<tom### [at] imporg>  wrote:

>   1) It would no longer be a bugfix release

Any stable release of any version that adds big chunks of code would take
several month.

>   2) They would need to support patches they did not write or
>      rewrite them.

Rewrite. No offense to those who work on MegaPOV or the other patches, but
they indeed all suffer from exactly the same problems the patches that the
POV-Team had to integrate into 3.5.  The current patches hardly get finished
or bugfixed very well.  Don't expected anybody in the POV-Team is willing to
repeat the same mistake again by reusing code from patches that don't work
and then take years to get fixed.

>   3) It would need a beta period.

It sure would.

>   4) It would just further delay 4.0

No, it would kill POV-Ray.  The time wasted to rewrite and fix logic of new
patches would do damage beyond repair to thug motivation of POV-Team
members.  The POV-Team is **not** the throw-some-half-baked-patch-and-get-
them-to-fix-it-team.  Programming is fun, debugging is hard work.  And doing
it all day for a living does not imply anybody wants to do it in all their
free time.  In fact, that is the main reason why so few patches ever reach a
true release quality state.

>   5) The patches are already available elsewhere

Indeed.

>   6) They don't want to ;)

No, because there is no need to.  The need of a very few should never be
considered as major goal in any software project.  Otherwise you end up with
bloated, buggy software just like you use it every day and wish at least the
0.1% of the features you need daily (which happen to be 0.001% of the
features actually in the program) would work.


    Thorsten


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

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

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