Hello,

I feel the topic of filename extensions is rather prone to
flamewars, but sorry, here I go. Anyway, it's rather cold
today, a bit of warming can't do harm.  :-)

Quite a lot of filenames come from the DOS days of POV, and
have kept some pecularities that should be changed. Especially,
a lot of text files have some funny extensions that where
useful in the days of 8.3 filenames, but confuse Windows, KDE,
GNOME and other environments that rely on the file extension
to open then with the correct application.

I think especially povlegal.doc, povwhere.get and the .cat
files should be renamed to .txt. Or .doc.txt, .get.txt and
.cat.txt, if you prefer. As long as the file contains ASCII
text and is not a language specific to an application, it
should have a .txt extension.

.doc is now universally understood as Microsoft Word Document,
and .cat is, IIRC, a Security Catalog in some places.

Now for the hot topic... :-)

While I think the usage of .pov is unquestionnable, I never
liked too much .inc, which is way too generic. .mcr is not
much better. I think .pvi and .pvm would be better (or .povi
and .povm), because they'd be more unique to POV. Okay,
this doesn't belong here, sorry...

-- 
Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
 Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

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Update: I've just installed beta 2.

povwhere.get has been corrected, probably also in beta 1.
But still, there are the .cat files and povlegal.doc.

-- 
Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
 Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

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> While I think the usage of .pov is unquestionnable, I never
> liked too much .inc, which is way too generic. .mcr is not
> much better. I think .pvi and .pvm would be better (or .povi
> and .povm), because they'd be more unique to POV.

Also, there is the completely generic .ini extension.

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On Mon, 17 Sep 2001 11:47:02 +0200, Adrien Beau
<adr### [at] sycomorefr> wrote:

>I think especially povlegal.doc, povwhere.get and the .cat
>files should be renamed to .txt. 

This sounds like a very good idea to me. I hope the POV-Team agrees.

While they are at it, the scenes that contain files with ".c1", ".c2",
".c3", ".sph", and ".tri" extensions should probably be reworked to
make those all ".inc" extensions.

Later,
Glen

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"Anders K." wrote:
> 
> > While I think the usage of .pov is unquestionnable, I never
> > liked too much .inc, which is way too generic. .mcr is not
> > much better. I think .pvi and .pvm would be better (or .povi
> > and .povm), because they'd be more unique to POV.
> 
> Also, there is the completely generic .ini extension.

This one is not so easy.

There is an unformulated "ini" standard. Ini files can be
broken into sections (lines with [foobar]), and they are made
of pairs of keyword=value, with lines commented (iirc) with a
semicolon.

POV follows this convention (although it authorizes command-
line options to be included as well, which is not standard),
so imho it can use the .ini extension.

Now, of course, comes the problem of syntax highlighting.
While any program can highlight .ini files (just highlighting
[sections] and ;comments), it's better if it knows the
authorized keywords so the user can quickly see typos, which
is the aim of syntax highlighting.

But in the case of .ini files, I think the best to do is to
use a modeline (emacs and vim allow that), that is a special
comment at the beginning or end of file.

Or use .pvc/.povc (POV config).

NOTE: I know of course that the user can already name the
files as (s)he wishes. What I'm talking about is default.
And again, sorry, I shouldn't have brought this .pvi, .pvm
issue here.

-- 
Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
 Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

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Glen Berry wrote:
> 
> While they are at it, the scenes that contain files with ".c1", ".c2",
> ".c3", ".sph", and ".tri" extensions should probably be reworked to
> make those all ".inc" extensions.

Or perhaps .c1.inc, .c2.inc, etc. The extensions have a meaning
that should perhaps be preserved this way.

-- 
Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
 Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

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Adrien Beau wrote:
> 
> Glen Berry wrote:
> >
> > While they are at it, the scenes that contain files with ".c1", ".c2",
> > ".c3", ".sph", and ".tri" extensions should probably be reworked to
> > make those all ".inc" extensions.
> 
> Or perhaps .c1.inc, .c2.inc, etc. The extensions have a meaning
> that should perhaps be preserved this way.
> 
	
	double-dot extensions are not make-friendly, I guess.

-- 
Thierry, (42++)++

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"Thierry B." <oul### [at] chezcom> wrote in message
news:3BA62934.51C07863@chez.com...
> Adrien Beau wrote:
> >
> > Glen Berry wrote:
> > >
> > > While they are at it, the scenes that contain files with ".c1", ".c2",
> > > ".c3", ".sph", and ".tri" extensions should probably be reworked to
> > > make those all ".inc" extensions.
> >
> > Or perhaps .c1.inc, .c2.inc, etc. The extensions have a meaning
> > that should perhaps be preserved this way.
> >
>
> double-dot extensions are not make-friendly, I guess.

The only ones I know of are those for the teapot and chess piece mesh
scenes.
Obviously unconventional file naming is not very intuitive when POV-Ray
can't load a file by only looking at its main name alone.  But you can kind
of see where people would try to use one particular main name and apply
varied extensions for the includes, for example.

I once tried hacking (I'm not compiler savvy at all) the source code
directly to have ini be inp, among other things too, and renaming every
external file I encountered to accomodate that change was ridiculous.  I
quickly returned to accepting what POV-Ray already did and haven't messed
with it since.

Bob H.

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"Adrien Beau" <adr### [at] sycomorefr> wrote in message
news:3BA609F6.AC6AFD7C@sycomore.fr...
> Glen Berry wrote:
> >
> > While they are at it, the scenes that contain files with ".c1", ".c2",
> > ".c3", ".sph", and ".tri" extensions should probably be reworked to
> > make those all ".inc" extensions.
>
> Or perhaps .c1.inc, .c2.inc, etc. The extensions have a meaning
> that should perhaps be preserved this way.
>
> --
> Adrien Beau - adr### [at] freefr - http://adrien.beau.free.fr
>  Mes propos n'engagent que moi et en aucun cas mes employeurs

Question:  Is POV still supported on systems that do not support LFNs or
doubledots or anything like that?  5 years ago, the question would have been
ridiculous, but what about now?

...Chambers

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Ben Chambers <bdc### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
: Question:  Is POV still supported on systems that do not support LFNs or
: doubledots or anything like that?

  How many systems like that do you know?

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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