Christoph Hormann wrote:
> Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>> Then you fundamentally misunderstood the point we always made: We will not
>> discuss the design in public, and we do not endorse design discussions in
>> public either.  Every discussion about design ideas is just ignored,
>> regardless of what is being discussed.
> 
> Speaking only for myself:
> 
> this is a bit exaggerated (or at least could be easily misunderstood).
> Development of POV-Ray does (and i hope will always do) include
> discussion in the POV Community.  This of course does not mean that
> everything is first discussed in the public newsgroups.
> [...]
I'm glad to read a very reasonable statement from Christoph (and also from 
Warp) after having read Thorsten's previous message. (Well, I'm not sure 
how he really meant it but I read it twice and understood it like "we are 
the cooks and the users should eat what we dish them up - or leave it".) 

I completely agree that there need to be only 1 or 2 people who should do 
the main design. Once the interfaces are designed, things like individual 
input/output drivers (different image formats, etc.) could be implemented by 
more/other people. 
And also implementation details should not be discussed (at least not yet). 

But I would strongly suggest that the chief designer puts together a list 
where he notes down all that input from the community which is relevant 
even if it seems to be "uninteresting" and when finally planning he can go 
through the list and decide what should actually be made possible. 
I call this an "idea map" and have quite a lot of paper around for that. 

And finally, there is another problem: Time. Because there is no point to 
plan the best raytracer in the world for one's complete life to have it in 
production shortly before end of one's life, to put it drastically. Because 
one then cannot use it any more. 

And here, things meet: Probably a lot of people would be much happier 
if they either saw that POVRay is making steady advances or at least 
their ideas would be encouraged/accepted. 

But for me "outside here" is just feels like everyone (including the team) 
is merely dreaming of version 4 and actually not putting much effort into 
design or development. I'm not sure if that is really the case or if I have 
to blame the closed development model for that. 
But my overall feeling suggests against the latter and of course there is 
nobody who could force anybody to work on a free project. 

Regards,
Wolfgang

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