Am 23.09.2015 um 14:55 schrieb Benjamin Chambers:

> Given that package managers are pretty much ubiquitous in software
> development (even Visual Studio has Nuget, which has served me quite
> well in my {admittedly limited} needs), it may be time to rethink this.

While package managers may be /becoming/ more common right now in the
Windows world, there seem to be fundamental differences; for one, in the
Unix world package management includes distribution of libraries in
binary form, whereas NuGet seems to operate on the source code level.

As for being "ubiquitous", there's still quite a way to go; I don't know
about VS 2015, but in VS 2010 NuGet wasn't an integral part, and people
still use that version out in the wild. Also, the ready availability of
libraries still seems to be wanting, for instance according to NuGet's
web page there's no OpenEXR package yet. There's also the issue of
maintenance: Are the packages on NuGet guaranteed to be properly
maintained? By whom? In the Unix world, this is clearly the
responsibility of distro managers. Speaking of which, in the Unix world
you also have a long tradition of simply refering to your distro for
virtually all your package needs; how this will play out in the Windows
world - whether NuGet.org will advance to such a single point of
reference, or whether things will remain more spread out - is yet to be
seen.


Maintaining POV-Ray is a long-term task with limited manpower, and it's
no use exhausting ourselves by keeping up the pace with all the latest
and greatest trends in software development. We'll leave that up to
people who do shorter-term projects, see how that plays out for them,
and adopt whatever comes out as tried, tested and well-established good
practice.

No offense there; it's just the way we roll - need to roll - in POV-Ray
development.

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