>     All right so my example wasn't perfect. I suppose you won't like th
e
> next either since both patches are available together in megapov now:
> clothray and mechsim. There was  time when those two where completely
> separate patches and couldn't be used together. Plugins would have
> made that possible (and would have removed the requirement for someone
> to spend time integrating the two together, so that person could have
> spend his time working on new features/enhancements).

No, a clothray plugin for POV-Ray 3.1 would have had to be modified for 
3.5 just like the patch had to.  Same for mechsim.

The time spent 'integrating the two together' was exactly zero - except 
maybe a few shared keywords.

So if both patches were implemented with some theoretical plugin system 
(and i don't even want to try to imagine how this would have to look 
like for allowing the mechsim patch in the current form) they would not 
have been available to be used together a day earlier than they have 
been now.

To sum it up - your central argument seems to be a plugin system would 
offer the possibilities of patches without maintainance work in a 'write 

once - use forever' manner.  This is not the case.

And concerning Renderman-like shaders - i already explained that the 
POVMan patch would have not been possible to implement as a plugin.  But 

to have support for Renderman shaders in POV-Ray would of course be nice 

but this is not a plugin system (shaders are not dynamically linked 
external modules, they are possible to be implemented in a completely 
portable way).

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Sim-POV,
HCR-Edit and more: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
Last updated 23 Sep. 2004 _____./\/^>_*_<^\/\.______

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