>     Actually, it used to have a reasonably active community of
> contributors (just before 3.5 was released). They didn't contribute
> directly to the core, but instead they contributed to MegaPov. That
> worked because (here we find your two points):
> ~ - Most discussion took place openly on the newsgroups here;
> ~ - Nathan Kopp (who maintained MegaPov at the time) released new
> versions very frequently (including the source).
> 
>     When 3.5 came out, all this activity petered out. Among the
> possible reasons are:
> ~ - Nathan got included in the core team and had less time to keep
> releasing MegaPov on the same rythm;

More like: Nathan graduated from university and moved to another city, got a 
full-time job and enjoys a real-life ;-)

> ~ - The 3.5 code was quite different from the 3.1 code (on which
> MegaPov and all community development were based and which was
> pretty old at the time). When 3.5 came out, it required a
> significant investment to port the patches to the new code base and
> most contributors didn't want to spend that time re-doing something
> they had already done just to have to do it again when the next
> version came out (which is one reason why I never ported my
> contributions to the new code base and simply moved to other projects).

More like: The code in 3.5 was not substantially different from 3.1 The 
problem was that the POV-Team had to spend months over months getting the 
MegaPOV patches into a full working order. As it turned out much to the 
POV-Team's disappointment, most of them worked only 95% of the time and they 
were not production quality. Yet, some problems could not be fixed in finite 
time, i.e. that is why sphere-sweeps sing splines have bounding problems. 
The bounding algorithm in the original implementation never worked right. 
BTW, this bug is relatively well known, yet no external developer ever fixed 
it :-(

	Thorsten

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