On 3/16/2013 10:27 AM, clipka wrote:
> Am 16.03.2013 16:55, schrieb Timwi:
>> On 15/03/2013 22:30, clipka wrote:
>>> Am 15.03.2013 20:03, schrieb Timwi:
>>>> Well, neither of those turn the GUI off. All of them open a POV-ray
>>>> editor window, do the render (visibly!) and then exit.
>>>>
>>>> This way, rendering a hundred images requires me to either run 100 GUI
>>>> instances, or run them one after the other. In both cases, my computer
>>>> is completely unusable for quite some time while windows keep popping
>>>> up.
>>>>

>>>
>>> There are various reasons for this, one being a series of "copyleft
>>> infringements": At some time various people thought it was ok to sell
>>> commercial software that deliberately hid the fact that the actual
>>> rendering was done with POV-Ray; at that point, it was decided to have
>>> the Windows version always fire up the GUI. (At least that's what I've
>>> heard tell.)
>>
>> Surely the correct response to that is to sue the perpetrator, not to
>> massively inconvenience all Windows users...
>
> Lawsuits were filed, as a matter of fact - but law is slow to take
> effect, and it didn't help that the copyleft concept was still
> comparatively new back then. (Not to mention that quite a lot of money
> had to be thrown at those lawsuits to fight them through; AFAIK the last
> of them was still ongoing at the end of the POV-Ray 3.7 beta phase, and
> one of the problems slowing down 3.7 development in those days was that
> Thorsten was working hard to make the necessary money to keep those
> lawsuits running.)
>
> As for "massively" inconveniencing "all" Windows users: Most Windows
> users have been happy to run their renders from within the GUI, and
> Windows never really made batch processing easy anyway, so people
> requiring batch processing would typically turn towards Linux in the
> first place.
>
>
> Times are changing, and judging past decisions based on today's
> circumstances is cheap, and moot besides if the decision is already
> being revised. As I said, we're likely to see a revival of the
> command-line-only POV-Ray version for Windows.
>
Of course, there is also the "alternative", which is to have the GUI, 
but allow for a "batch" processing queue. I could see a case where even 
working on something in the GUI could either branch a new instance, to 
run a quick test render, while the queue is still running, or insert it 
as "next in line" (possibly less useful, given the render times involved 
in many cases). This would, in effect, not only allow work with it was 
doing other things, if needed, but also provide a clear list of what was 
"up and coming", which a person could halt, edit, rearrange, etc. None 
of which is exactly plausible using a pure "batch from command line" 
solution.

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