I was curious if the POV-Team consider implementing some of the custom
patches available, or at least the idea. This has already happened to the
#system patch and in 3.0 to the FTPOV version. What I am particularly
interested in are the "get object bounds" and slope patches. The rest seem
(to me) more difficult to implement (RBezier, dswpov etc.

Any ideas?

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On Sat, 5 Sep 1998 07:12:36 +0300, "Peter Popov" <pet### [at] usanet>
wrote:

>I was curious if the POV-Team consider implementing some of the custom
>patches available, or at least the idea. This has already happened to the
>#system patch and in 3.0 to the FTPOV version. What I am particularly
>interested in are the "get object bounds" and slope patches. The rest seem
>(to me) more difficult to implement (RBezier, dswpov etc.

As I understand it, three things have to happen for the POV-Team to
add a patch to POV.  

First, they have to be told about it.  This doesn't happen as often as
you might think, and some patches we all know about might be
completely unknown to them, because they don't necessarily read cgrr
or even this news server as religiously as we all do.  Quoting (with
permission) from an email message I received from Chris Young: 

+-------------
|Many of the patches you mentioned as not making it into POV-Ray I'd never
|heard of until very recently.  Posting a notice on cgrr and putting a patch
|on a web site is not an effective way of getting the team's attention.  
[...]
|We were DEEP into wrapping up 3.1 when I FIRST HEARD OF the isosurface patch.
|Had I known about it, we'd have put it in 3.1 also.
+-------------

Second, the Team have to be given permission to use the patch.  As 
the author of the object bounds patch, I know I haven't given such
permission, though I would if asked.  I just never thought to do so.
I suspect a lot of patch authors are in a similar position.

Third, the Team have to consider the patch worthy of adding.  Since my

object bounds patch doesn't work on certain objects and isn't 100% 
reliable, I doubt that it would make it into an official POV-Ray
without a lot of changes and caveats.  But it works for the things
we use it for.  Quoting again from the same email:

+-------------
|Another problem with user-patches is partial implementations that make it
|hard to fully implement later.  I've rejected 4 or 5 patches to add
|uv_mapping to bezier patch.  I've insisted we do full uv_mapping as an
|option on ALL objects.  
+-------------

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Well, so things really should go the official way. Maybe if someone (maybe
even me?) gets in contact with custom version developers and informs of how
things are, there is a chance that the development of POV 3.1 is not
approaching its final stage and another feature or two might creep in. We
already saw that in 3.1 beta stages - the #system patch and material {}
keyword, though the latter was (probably) the result of a general RFC and
not a custom build (there was a #system patch for 3.01, wasn't there?)

Frankly, I will contact Chris Young and discuss the matter with him. Maybe
we'll find a solution.

Regards,

Peter

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