Thorsten Froehlich  wrote in message <487ee7da$1@news.povray.org>:
> Which nobody (for the major remaining bugs) has done either <sigh>

Having a community of contributors takes time.

Do you follow the development of other projects?

I would like to take the example of ffmpeg and mplayer, because I follow
their development quite carefully. They get a lot of contributions: there is
a small group of regular contributors who send patches to enhance their
particular area of interest or correct some bugs; sometimes some of these
regulars contributors is offered a write access to the source code. There
are also, from time to time, people who arrive out of the blue and propose a

big thread to make their patch acceptable with regard to the project coding
style. Among these people, there are Google Summer of Code students. And
there are people who occasionally propose small patches for this or that.
There is hardly a day without a small exchange on the mailing-list: "This
patch does foo. / Patch looks ok. / Applied.".


project. Why is it not the case for POV-Ray?

I believe the answer is quite simple: people contribute to ffmpeg or mplayer
because they can see, before even delving in the source code, that
contributions are welcome. And how can they see that? First of all, because
a lot of contributions are accepted every week. That is a snowball effect: a
project starts with a few contributions, and these contributions attract new
contributors. Such effects are very slow on the beginnings, but very
gratifying once they are running.

But for such a snowball effect to happen, the development needs to be open.
Which means at least:

- a public developers mailing-list; that list must be where the actual
  development takes place, or at least a significant part of it;

- access to the current state of the source code; the best way to achieve
  that is to offer read-only anonymous access to a version control system.

I can pretty well guarantee that, as long as POV-Ray does not have these two
items, it will never have an active community of contributors.




benefit financially from it, nothing more.

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