In article <3f6ec2ef@news.povray.org> , "Rick [Kitty5]" 
<spa### [at] kitty5com> wrote:

>>> Perhaps some developer diaries / blog would help kill this question.
>>
>> No, it would only result in more questions as *most* people tend to
>> not understand certain things unless they see them.
>
> It's such a shame we're all so retarded. (not that I expected for one moment
> that Thorsten 'grumpy' Froehlich would be one to volunteer)

No, but have you actually considered what kind of description would be
needed to actually make this information useful at all?

For example this from the current change log.  Without knowing what was
actually changed, most of the information is essentially useless, especially
for a non-programmer:

Change 2187 on 2003/08/25 by thorsten@host27
 Changes a few casts
 Removes pointless use of floating-point math
 Enables beta message
 Some error message text changes to match rest of code
 Renames a statistics enum to avoid a name confusion
 Other little tweaks

Change 2179 on 2003/08/19 by chrisc@lilliput
 Fix precedence error in parse.cpp re:bounding slabs.
 Fix problem in optin.cpp regaring spurious warnings about needing quotes.

Change 2177 on 2003/08/18 by calimet@lavender
 [unix] Updated configure.ac : a few internal mods for sanity.
        Updated prebuild.sh:
        - fix for build failure in unix/ on cygwin (misuse of X_CFLAGS
          inherited from 3.5)
        - little tweaks in the install and uninstall targets.

Change 1931 on 2002/10/05 by thorsten@host27
 Adds POVMSStream_xxx utility functions for reading and
  writing data in network byteorder. The byteorder is determined
  automatically at runtime! Only on platforms on which IEEE 754
  floating-point numbers are not standard, the macros
  POVMSIEEEFloat, POVMSFloatToPOVMSIEEEFloat,
  POVMSIEEEFloatToPOVMSFloat and HexToPOVMSIEEEFloat
  have to be redefined.

Or do you expect us to use our spare time and write something such that it
cannot be misunderstood instead of actually fixing bugs and improving code?
And what if something wasn't written for say four weeks in such a diary?
Who would then deal with the flood of emails asking if POV-Ray is dead?  You
aren't the one having to answer all the odd questions people can come up
with every day.  And you would be surprised how odd the questions can be!

    Thorsten

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

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

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