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Christoph Hormann wrote:
| No, a clothray plugin for POV-Ray 3.1 would have had to be modified for
| 3.5 just like the patch had to.  Same for mechsim.
|
	Uh? I never said that they wouldn't need to be adapted when changing
versions of povray if the plugin interface changed.

| The time spent 'integrating the two together' was exactly zero - except
| maybe a few shared keywords.
|
	So why did it take over 6 month between the time they became
available as independant patches and the time they were both merged
into the "official" megapov?

| So if both patches were implemented with some theoretical plugin system
| (and i don't even want to try to imagine how this would have to look
| like for allowing the mechsim patch in the current form)
	Well, of course they would have had to be written as plugins in the
first place. I'm not saying that they *should* be reimplemented as
plugins if those ever became available but that if they *could* have
been, we would have gained in flexibility.

| they would not
| have been available to be used together a day earlier than they have
| been now.
|
	Sure they would. It would have been possible to use them together
immediately after release by their respective authors. There's nothing
preventing the use of several plugins at the same time!

| To sum it up - your central argument seems to be a plugin system would
| offer the possibilities of patches without maintainance work in a
'write
| once - use forever' manner.  This is not the case.
|
	Not *without* maintenance, but with less maintenance and most of it
done by the people writing the functionnality rather than requiring
the work of an integrator to put everything together.

| And concerning Renderman-like shaders - i already explained that the
| POVMan patch would have not been possible to implement as a plugin.
	No, you have stated that it wouldn't. Since I don't know how POVMan
itself is implemented I can't say how easy (or possible) it would be
to change it into a plugin, but the *functionnality* it provides could
be implemented as a plugin as long as the plugin system supported
texture plugins.

| But
| to have support for Renderman shaders in POV-Ray would of course be
nice
| but this is not a plugin system (shaders are not dynamically linked
| external modules,
	I never said they were. But the interpreter that runs the shaders
could be implemented as a "dynamically linked external module".

		Jerome
- --
******************************
*      Jerome M. Berger      *
* mailto:jbe### [at] ifrancecom *
*  http://jeberger.free.fr/  *
******************************
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