On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>
>I told you why:
>
>"As a matter of fact the directive
>is there for exactly this reason because in the past countless people did
>not read any documentation and started to distribute unofficial versions of
>POV-Ray that violated the POV-Ray license."
>
>The license requires that you provide the information your are supposed to
>enter there if you want to distribute the version you compiled.
>
>    Thorsten

  I have just read this thread and am filled with the urge to ask the same
  question that I have asked many times before :

	Why is there no Official build for Solaris?

  In the past I have exchanged emails with Mark Gordon on this topic and
  the answer is generally the same every time : you need the Sun hardware.

  I agree that you need the Sun hardware and, far more importantly, the
  correct and professional development tools to build the binaries in such
  a way that they run well on the Intel Pentium revisions as well as the
  Sun Sparc processor revisions.  You can not achieve reasonable optimization
  with gcc and I think this fact has been very well demonstrated.

  I have wanted to build a correct and optimized build of POV-Ray for quite
  some time.  Building the previous revisions was no big deal but the latest
  rev caused me some issues.  Yes, I am sure that I can build it in its most
  recent edition but that is not the point.  Why is there no official version?

  Before you answer that quation with "I don't have Sun hardware and Forte
  compiler tools" may I suggest that you have a close look at the website
  at www.blastwave.org ?  You will note that an entire Sun Solaris development
  lab has been built there in which ALL the hardware and software required is
  provided to the user for free.  All they need to do is drop me a line with
  a proposal for the project that they will work on.  When done, the software
  will be bundled up as a correctly built Sun Solaris software package and
  then distributed by blastwave.org to the Sun user community.  Since I have
  built and funded the site, and Sun Microsystems is behind me on this, why
  is there no official build for POV-Ray for Solaris?

  Sun users want POV-Ray and Sun people, both internal and external, would be
  happy to help you with it.

  After all, doesn't POV-Ray deserve to be chewing up CPU cycles at every big
  Sun server farm all over the world?  :)

	Dennis M. Clarke
	Sponsor, Owner and Admin for
	CSW - Community Software for Solaris
	http://www.blastwave.org/

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