On 23/07/2020 10:57, Bald Eagle wrote:
> Yes...  but it seems ---- not right.
> When one volunteers, it's usually assumed that it's not - done in a vacuum.
> One might volunteer at a soup kitchen, but at least call in when sick or
> quitting.

The fact he stopped doing anything at all on github for almost a year
suggests to me that it's probably more than the fact he just doesn't
want to work on POV (though that's just conjecture on my part). It could
be he just got fed up with me or POV in general, he could have been
abducted by aliens, or maybe he was unwell. He doesn't need to tell us
if he doesn't want (though of course I would have liked to know).

Whatever the case, I'm grateful for the work he put in and was quietly
hoping he'd return, but if it's not to be then it's not to be.

>> When discussing how to move forward on our dev mail list the point was
>> raised that we probably need to inspect some of his more recent changes
>> as we simply don't know if they were intended to be complete or a
>> work-in-progress. If in doing so we find or suspect the latter to be the
>> case then we need to work out what to do: try to finish it or remove it.
> 
> Is there a method to doing that?  A checklist?

Basically it's manual inspection of each change checked into git by
someone experienced enough with C++ and the internals of POV-Ray to
understand what they are reading and how it could affect the rest of the
codebase.

> (And you keep saying "we".  You can tell us who everyone is, right?  It's a
> secret cabal of international raytracing developers, isn't it...)

There's currently 9 members of the dev list; if they want to identify
themselves they are free to post here. While it's not a secret I still
need to respect their privacy as some may not consider themselves a
contributor (or at least anymore). For example there's a few members who
haven't posted for a few years.

If you want to know who works on the core code of 3.8, with Christoph
gone unless we get more help it's basically going to be me.

>> outgoings are the annual accountant + corporate registration fees, which
>> I pay on its behalf.
> 
> For 25 years?  :O

Less than 20 years (not sure of the date we incorporated but it was
after 2000).

> Domain name?  Secure data center.  Must be other stuff...

'Secure data center' is basically any decent colocation place these
days; i.e. you can't just show up and wander around as there's equipment
from dozens or hundreds of companies. I only made that mention in
respect of your thought that DB could assist.

> I suspected as much, and have corresponded with a few of these people, and
> posted some results of searches I have done on a few occasions.  While searching

I also forgot to mention another class of user: those who are into 3d
modelling but don't hand-code SDL. There's a few modellers that have
plugins that generate SDL for consumption by POV (though typically they
just output meshes). Don't want to break those, either, if I can help
it, though changes that affect them are more likely to be visual than
SDL-related as their output is fairly simple.

> Understandable - perhaps 3.8 beta might never become 3.8 official, and just
> leap-frog right over to 4.0.0-alpha

Yes but then I'd have to deal with all the complaints that 4.0 was
intended to be a re-write :-) ... honestly there's no real reason to go
to 4.0, 3.8 is fine as long as we get our ducks in a row (exactly which
type of duck and how many rows is a topic I'll cover in the post about
the release process).

> Once again - thanks for taking the time to relay all of that information and
> just - talk about things.

No problem, it's good to discuss stuff like this as it helps clear
misconceptions. Having been with the project for such a long time I
simply don't know what people do or don't know; some things I take for
granted might be mysterious to others.

-- Chris

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