On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
>In article <Pine.GSO.4.53.0303301152250.15852@blastwave> , Dennis Clarke
><dcl### [at] blastwaveorg>  wrote:
>
>>   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?
>
>The team has one maintainer for every platform with official support.  And
>official versions require official support.  Which requires detailed
>knowledge about the system being supported.  It is more than just compiling
>POV-Ray.  So we just follow a conservative approach in not making official
>versions available we cannot promise we will be able to support.  There is
>nothing keeping from anybody else making unofficial versions available.  In
>essence, official support is the only difference between official compiles
>and unofficial compiles of the official source code.

  In that case I guess it will be OK for the people at www.blastwave.org to
  go ahead and package up POV-Ray for Solaris and then release that build
  to the Solaris community as an unofficial build.

>
>>   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.
>
>Indeed, without it is hard.  Of course, those are easy to get access to for
>some people, but access and time are two different stories ;-)

  Thankfully the blastwave crew has a membership full of die-hard Sun types
  that can easily program their way through the builds.  I don't expect that
  we will change the code unless there are valid reasons to avoid compiler
  warnings or errors.

>
>>   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.
>
>Well, the build issues on various non-Linux Unix versions are being
>addressed, and some pieces of it (like 64 bit compatibility) will be
>available in 3.51 source code.  It will only get easier to compile and run
>POV-Ray on multiple Unix platforms in the future.

  I see that there has been work done in that area and with luck POV-Ray will
  post respectable performance numbers while being consistent across the
  different architectures.

>
>>   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?
>
>Well, just having the hardware and software obviously isn't enough for an
>officially supported version as pointed out above.  There is more to it, and
>there is also a "political" aspect: Once we soften our stand of when a
>compile is official, we also get users of other platforms asking for the
>same.

  I agree and see your point clearly.

>
>The users of Power, MIPS, PA-RISC or Alpha based systems with their
>multitude of Unix (-like) systems will want their official version as well.
>
>>   After all, doesn't POV-Ray deserve to be chewing up CPU cycles at every big
>>   Sun server farm all over the world?  :)
>
>Well, given that the POV-Ray 3.x does not support multithreading or any
>other means of easy way to run efficiently on multiprocessor systems with
>all features working, there isn't too much point to it.  Otherwise I would
>really love to run compile and run POV-Ray on this
><http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/hpc/SUN/index_e.html> baby at my current
>university assuming I would find the time next to graduate studies ;-)

 Ah yes, the old multi-threading issue that has haunted POVRay users for many
 years.  I think that a complete rewrite of the code would be required to get
 POV-Ray to dispatch POSIX compliant worker threads.  The thread model problem
 is a big one when one considers that you support Windows and Linux.  One can
 only shudder at the work load required to make POV-Ray a multithreaded ray
 tracing engine.

>
>So it is not lack of interest that prevents an official version, but it is
>lack of feasibility taking into account all of the various issues I pointed
>out above.
>
>Sorry!

  Hey, I can always built it myself!

  Thanks for the quick reply :)

 Dennis Clarke
 dcl### [at] blastwaveorg

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