Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:

> I will NOT stand by and allow a
> 3.x release out that does not meet that same standard and if I do so I
> will be letting them all down. This is a responsibility I take seriously
> and I will not relent.

3.8 is in alpha.  End users _should_ know what that means, and 3.7 is still
available for those that want to use it.  I and others have been using 3.8 for
long enough that maybe it should be a beta?   I don't use M$ anymore - is there
a 3.8 windows executable?
If anything, it would look very nice on the website to have recent update, to
show that there's still active development, and provide a handy link to GitHub
or whatever the official channel would be...

> As long as 3.7 continues to operate as designed on modern operating
> systems and CPU's it's not broken and there is no pressing need to
> replace it.

There's not - but 3.8 has a lot of features that Christoph worked his ass off to
implement, and it would be great for people to use those, appreciate the
differences and improvements, and find any little lingering problems that might
be hidden in there.
[Why is everyone looking at _me_...?]

> Yes I'd like to see 3.8 out. Yes we need help to do so. I
> had decided to move development discussions to one of these groups so it
> is in public and ask for assistance from users; in particular as no-one
> in the current team is able to take on the job of managing the release I
> was going to ask for volunteers from here.

I sincerely doubt that I have the skills or round tuits required to do that, but
it would be helpful to anyone considering it to know what "managing the release"
typically entails.

> As for the website: again I was going to post a longer explanation but
> I'll simply say the box it's running on is 15 years old, on its last
> legs, difficult to manage/upgrade as it's in the US and I'm not and no
> longer has a working IPKVM, and does not run a CMS to speak of. I'm
> loath to touch it in any meaningful way until I have it replaced.

AFAIK, it's in CT, and D.B. has physical access.
I've asked before how much is stored on it, and what it would take to simply
_copy_ the content, lest a HDD crash wipe out nearly 25 years of images, scene
files, includes, etc.
I'm sure there might be a few folks who would pay for a USB stick with all of
the files on it.  IIRC, they're now commonly available in 128 GB sizes...
(It truly boggles the mind!  :O)


> ... I want to
> make one thing clear to those who seem to think that I somehow 'owe' the
> community a Moray release. Moray was NOT 'given' to the POV-Ray project.
> I purchased it from the author.

A short 2-3 lines of text on the website about that would take care of any
misconceptions - even by new users.

It's that crappy situation where you don't "deserve" for people to give you a
hard time - but, in the absence of heading of any such assumptions and resulting
commentary - given human nature being what it is, what did you expect?
I'm trying to mean and communicate that in a helpful way - so you can hopefully
avoid any such future annoyances.

I was curious about who is still involved, in what way, if they are still alive,
in contact, actively working, etc.
There's a POV-Team, a dev team, a TAG team ...   what else?
How many different computer systems are at play?
The newsgroups, the object collection, the Moray website, ...  what else?

http://news.povray.org/povray.off-topic/message/%3Cweb.5f0077dd17b7b05ffb0b41570%40news.povray.org%3E/#%3Cweb.5f0077dd1
7b7b05ffb0b41570%40news.povray.org%3E

POV-Ray is ... a company? At least for the purposes of being on paper?
Money gets spent - does money come in?  Is there a balance?
Are there corporate or academic interests that help keep POV-Ray afloat and in
active development?

I mean, I don't mean to give you a hard time, but your post was short - but it
was light on the points it was "to".
"There are some issues in play that most people would not expect."  That still
seems to be a bit of a cliffhanger.

And really, I guess, as TdG has said, "For a number of years I too have
been wondering what really was going on behind the scene, with sometimes
getting a hint about possible issues...."

So, my puzzlement and curiosity are due to the fact that there is even a "behind
the scenes" at all.  It seems odd to me that there is a lot of time and effort
and money spent on a piece of software that is --- for what? --- if not the end
users?  I'm not saying that in an entitled way - I'm raising it in all
seriousness.  If you personally are not rendering images or animations, then why
all the personal cost and aggravation for something that is publicly available
for free?  The sensible, though naive answer would be "so that people can use
it".
And I believe that this is where the rub comes into play.
The people using it have their own goals and desires.
In the absence of any information to the contrary, people will communicate those
desires based on assumptions they will naturally make.  That's unavoidable human
nature.
And POV-Ray being around for 25 years with a website and newsgroup with a
history that reaches very very far back, and all the perceived talk of teams and
devs and versions, ...   I think it's hard to blame people for their perceptions
being their reality.

Perhaps there is not "secrecy" - but there seems to be an abundance of
....privacy?  ...silence? with regard to "Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty.
Ltd."  which gives rise to confusion, baseless but nevertheless natural
assumptions/presumptions, and the inevitable misconceptions and
miscommunications - and perhaps even misbehaviour.   ;)
I'm just expressing this as my perception - it seems that there's a weird
"overabundance of caution" and a lot of talking _around_ a topic rather than
just saying something directly (with a few disclaimers).

I think it would be a shame for all those tens of thousands of hours of effort
to fade into obscurity.   As I've stated before - POV-Ray could use some
exposure, advertising, social media presence, and fundraising.  New users with
the enthusiasm and energy and talent that is needed to make that 3.8 happen.
And that's an observation, not an assignment of blame.

I have posted things here and there on Minds.com, Xephula.com, Pocketnet.app -
I'm sure an animation channel on Bitchute.com or Brighteon, or other
video-hosting sites would provide some exposure.  It would simply seem to me
improper to create "POV-Ray" channels since I'm not in any way officially
associated with the company - and post other people's content, although I
suppose links could work...

Post a reply to this message

hi,

Thorsten <tho### [at] trfde> wrote:
> On 22.07.2020 18:28, jr wrote:
> > so my understanding of NNTP is that once a post has "gone through", it will
> > remain on that server indefinitely
>
> No, NNTP explicitly permits to cancel messages. ...

read/learned about 'control message'.  thanks.


regards, jr.

Post a reply to this message

On Wed, 22 Jul 2020 17:53:30 -0400, jr wrote:

> read/learned about 'control message'.  thanks.

I await your apology for insinuating that I lied to you about my role in 
the project.



-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

Post a reply to this message

On 23/07/2020 05:15, Bald Eagle wrote:
> 3.8 is in alpha.  End users _should_ know what that means, and 3.7 is still
> available for those that want to use it.  I and others have been using 3.8 for
> long enough that maybe it should be a beta?   I don't use M$ anymore - is there
> a 3.8 windows executable?

A beta can be made available, yes, but we need to work out what's in it
first as the features should not change between betas and final release.
See a little later on in this message regarding why we need to work this
out.

> If anything, it would look very nice on the website to have recent update, to
> show that there's still active development, and provide a handy link to GitHub
> or whatever the official channel would be...

Agreed. I will post a message to the front page.

> There's not - but 3.8 has a lot of features that Christoph worked his ass off to
> implement, and it would be great for people to use those, appreciate the
> differences and improvements, and find any little lingering problems that might
> be hidden in there.

Well here's the problem. Yes Christoph worked hard on it. But we simply
do not know if he considers the work complete or not. He just vanished.
We don't know why (and nor does he need to tell us; he's a volunteer and
can do as he pleases) but it does - for the first time in the project's
history - put us in a position where we're looking at doing a release
without the assistance of the person who made most of the changes going
into it.

I was concerned he may have been unwell as I noticed that his activity
on github (across all projects he contributes to) ceased at the same
time (I think roughly mid last year). A few of us have sent him hello's
via email but we've had no response. As of about two or so months ago I
see he has started to do stuff on github again so we know at least he's
there. Personally I wish him well and hope all is OK; I'm not going to
bother him since clearly if he wanted to communicate with us he would.

When discussing how to move forward on our dev mail list the point was
raised that we probably need to inspect some of his more recent changes
as we simply don't know if they were intended to be complete or a
work-in-progress. If in doing so we find or suspect the latter to be the
case then we need to work out what to do: try to finish it or remove it.

> I sincerely doubt that I have the skills or round tuits required to do that, but
> it would be helpful to anyone considering it to know what "managing the release"
> typically entails.

I'll answer that in a separate followup.

> AFAIK, it's in CT, and D.B. has physical access.

If by D.B. you mean Dik Balaska, no, he doesn't have physical access.
It's still in CT but was moved into a secured datacenter a number of
years ago.

> I've asked before how much is stored on it, and what it would take to simply

I don't recall seeing that (or if I answered it), but I think the
current backup is about 200GB in total (though the core content such as
databases and website content is much less - 200GB includes stuff like
log files, OS binaries and everything).

> _copy_ the content, lest a HDD crash wipe out nearly 25 years of images, scene
> files, includes, etc.

Fully understand your concern and it's one of my worries as well. New
system has RAID, the old one is a single spinning disk now (used to
be RAID but that controller died a long time ago). However the data is
well protected: there's an external SSD plugged into it that gets a
nightly backup via a cron job, plus I run a nightly rsync from my office
which keeps a full copy of the server contents here in Australia. If the
disk died the most that would be lost would be maybe a day's worth of data.

> There's a POV-Team, a dev team, a TAG team ...   what else?

Well the dev team is the same thing as the POV team basically. Maybe
once in the past when there were like 20 or 30 regular contributors we
may have made a distinction otherwise.

The TAG doesn't exist any more (they all moved on). All coordination is
done via a single mailing list.

> How many different computer systems are at play?

One.

>
http://news.povray.org/povray.off-topic/message/%3Cweb.5f0077dd17b7b05ffb0b41570%40news.povray.org%3E/#%3Cweb.5f0077dd17b7b05ffb0b41570%40news.povray.org%3E

Your comment about posting historical info is a good one and I'd like to
one day give a brain dump of what I can remember.

FWIW I also at some point will make the full revision history from the
time we started using perforce until we shifted to git public. I tried
migrating it to git (there is a tool for it) but it really didn't work
particularly well at the time (I think it was still in beta). Ideally
I'd like it all in git but it just may not be possible to do it cleanly
as there are some fundamental differences in the way the two systems
work. Worst case I'll put up a web interface direct to the perforce
server (they have a tool for that).

Having as much revision history available as possible is important for
long-term maintenance as it tells a story of what was done when and why.
I think I have changes going back to at least 1997 or something - I was
running a local perforce server to manage the windows code before the
team moved to it as a whole when I started managing the project.

(Prior to that we managed changes via email using diff and patch so
there's no real history to be gleaned prior to the above).

> POV-Ray is ... a company? At least for the purposes of being on paper?

Back when we changed to the AGPL3 we were assisted by the SFLC (Software
Freedom Law Center, which is part of the FSF). As part of this process
they advised (paraphrasing, I don't recall the exact words) that it
would be wise to have a legal entity to hold the intellectual property.
Hence the company.

Also FWIW having it in a single legal entity has other advantages in
that it makes it a bit simpler to transfer should that be required; e.g.
if I was incapacitated or passed away unexpectedly I have made it known
I wish the company to be passed to a suitable organization such as the
FSF (who can dissolve it and take over the IP if they wish, or just keep
it registered).

> Money gets spent - does money come in?  Is there a balance?

If you refer to Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd., then no and
no. It has never spent anything and has never received funds. Its only
outgoings are the annual accountant + corporate registration fees, which
I pay on its behalf.

> Are there corporate or academic interests that help keep POV-Ray afloat and in
> active development?

No.

> "There are some issues in play that most people would not expect."  That still
> seems to be a bit of a cliffhanger.

I suspect the main reason I said that was in relation to the situation
with Christoph. We wanted to have one last reach-out to him before
saying anything more.

> So, my puzzlement and curiosity are due to the fact that there is even a "behind
> the scenes" at all.  It seems odd to me that there is a lot of time and effort
> and money spent on a piece of software that is --- for what? --- if not the end
> users?  I'm not saying that in an entitled way - I'm raising it in all
> seriousness.

Fair question. The answer is that our 'end users' are more than those
who participate here or download POV-Ray for personal use. POV-Ray is
used by people who have code generated by programs or scripts (e.g. in
molecular modeling, academia in general). How many of these still remain
I don't know as they aren't required to tell us about it but my
understanding is it's not uncommon. These users don't deal with the
program in the same way you do - many aren't familiar with SDL and use
POV simply as part of a tool chain.

While I consider you guys (by which I mean anyone who uses it for fun)
as our primary user base I still need to care about other classes of
users. While you guys here may be able to adapt to a breaking change in
the way SDL works (either in syntax or in the way an image renders) in
many cases those who use POV from generated SDL won't have the knowledge
or means to fix it. They should be able to download the latest official
version from our website and just have it work as expected if this is at
all possible.

> all the personal cost and aggravation for something that is publicly available
> for free?  The sensible, though naive answer would be "so that people can use
> it".

Yes, it's so people can use it. ALL our users matter to me, including
those who simply use POV as a tool. This is why I'm so cautious about a
formal release that may break stuff. Even before I joined the project it
had a principle of preserving backwards compatibility where possible.
It's just how we did things.

Stability and compatibility is a promise I took on when I was elected
team leader and I'm keeping it. While I'm prepared to allow 4.0 (if it
ever happens) to break things entirely, any 3.x release needs to stay
stable - both in terms of output and in terms of not crashing when
someone does a multi-day render (memory leaks can be a bitch).

We had hoped the move to github along with the AGPL would encourage
people to fork POV and provide nice stuff for users who like to
experiment & have fun with and take pressure off the need to be seen to
have regular releases.

I know you're happy with the 3.8 alpha and it may be it's perfectly
suitable as a release, but there's a process that we need to go through
first which I will outline in another message.

> Perhaps there is not "secrecy" - but there seems to be an abundance of
> ....privacy?  ...silence? with regard to "Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty.
> Ltd."  which gives rise to confusion, baseless but nevertheless natural

I think you're the first person who has ever asked me about the company
(or if not then it was a long time ago). There's nothing secret about it
or the team really. We're just a bunch of folks who (nowadays)
communicate via a single email list which typically gets little traffic.

> As I've stated before - POV-Ray could use some exposure, advertising, social media
presence, and fundraising.

About fundraising: maybe there's a place for it, maybe not. One thing I
will say is that back in the very early days of POV (before I even
joined) the issue of funds was discussed by the original developers and
a decision was made that the project would neither solicit or accept
cash donations to the project as then we'd need to work out how to split
it up, and money sometimes does funny things to people.

That's not to say we don't accept donations at all: for example over the
years several of the hard drives on the server have been donated by
users, and several of us have had programming-related books we wanted
given. But we have never solicited cash and at least for now I'll stick
to that.

If in the future we need funding for a developer then I don't personally
have a problem with someone paying them direct or some such arrangement
(e.g. crowdfunding) but it would not be officially run by us and would
likely be treated no differently than if someone were writing it as a
volunteer.

Long-term if we wanted or needed a more formal funding arrangement I'd
have to talk to the SFLC about it and probably do it through the FSF.

> the enthusiasm and energy and talent that is needed to make that 3.8 happen.
> And that's an observation, not an assignment of blame.

I don't disagree. We perhaps diverge on how to get to that point.

Honestly at this stage I think the best thing I personally could do to
spice things up is get Moray out, even if it's a binary only release. It
means diving into code I didn't write and don't understand but it's at
least a solid target, and who knows, I may even enjoy it.

But as far as 3.8 goes, yes it will happen but when I can't say as we
have to solve the manpower problem. See my followup regarding your
question about what a release manager needs to do (may be a day or two
before I post that, let's see how much free time I have later today).

-- Chris

Post a reply to this message

On Thu, 23 Jul 2020 08:36:59 +1000, Chris Cason wrote:

>> Are there corporate or academic interests that help keep POV-Ray afloat
>> and in active development?
> 
> No.

Just a perhaps random thought, but perhaps someone in the community has 
ties into SIGGRAPH (part of ACM) or a similar academic organization who 
might have members interested in helping revive/reinvigorate the project, 
particularly student developers who could be mentored on the code.

Even if it generated a fork similar to MegaPOV as a "research fork", that 
might increase interest in the main branch development.

There's a lot of interest around ray tracing technology in general 
(generally GPU-driven, particularly real-time work in the gaming 
industry, but also from what I have seen, also in the film industry).  
That might be an area to look for capable developers who maybe don't 
currently know about the project's existence.

-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

Post a reply to this message

Chris, thank you very much for taking the time to very extensively talk about
the many and varied topics that have been brought up.  I'm sure what you've
worked to address has been on a lot of people's minds in one way or another for
years.

Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:

> Well here's the problem. Yes Christoph worked hard on it. But we simply
> do not know if he considers the work complete or not. He just vanished.
> We don't know why (and nor does he need to tell us; he's a volunteer and
> can do as he pleases)

Yes...  but it seems ---- not right.
When one volunteers, it's usually assumed that it's not - done in a vacuum.
One might volunteer at a soup kitchen, but at least call in when sick or
quitting.
We had a volunteer fire department/rescue squad in one of the towns I lived in,
and one would have expected that they'd use the taxpayer-purchased equipment and
training to -- you know - rescue people.   For some reason they sat outside a
friend's burning building for hours like cowards while he died of smoke
inhalation.
.... and now we're moving on ...


> When discussing how to move forward on our dev mail list the point was
> raised that we probably need to inspect some of his more recent changes
> as we simply don't know if they were intended to be complete or a
> work-in-progress. If in doing so we find or suspect the latter to be the
> case then we need to work out what to do: try to finish it or remove it.

Is there a method to doing that?  A checklist?
(And you keep saying "we".  You can tell us who everyone is, right?  It's a
secret cabal of international raytracing developers, isn't it...)


> > it would be helpful to anyone considering it to know what "managing the release"
> > typically entails.
>
> I'll answer that in a separate followup.

Thanks - that will be interesting and informative.


> It's still in CT but was moved into a secured datacenter a number of
> years ago.

And here's one of the parts that mystifies me --- all of that costs ... money.

> ... I think the
> current backup is about 200GB in total (though the core content such as
> databases and website content is much less - 200GB includes stuff like
> log files, OS binaries and everything).

Interesting.   It would be cool to see if there's a software that could split
everything up into directories, like images, includes, etc. with date codes to
differentiate the various versions (screen.inc and bordered characters have had
quite a few...)
I suppose even a few simple recursive directory searches that returned the
number of different file types would be interesting.  3D column chart over
time...  ;)



> > _copy_ the content, lest a HDD crash wipe out nearly 25 years of images, scene
> > files, includes, etc.
>
> Fully understand your concern and it's one of my worries as well. New
> system has RAID, the old one is a single spinning disk now (used to
> be RAID but that controller died a long time ago). However the data is
> well protected: there's an external SSD plugged into it that gets a
> nightly backup via a cron job, plus I run a nightly rsync from my office
> which keeps a full copy of the server contents here in Australia. If the
> disk died the most that would be lost would be maybe a day's worth of data.

Impressive.  Also good to know.



> As part of this process
> they advised (paraphrasing, I don't recall the exact words) that it
> would be wise to have a legal entity to hold the intellectual property.
> Hence the company.

Right.  I figured it was something like that.


> If you refer to Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd., then no and
> no. It has never spent anything and has never received funds. Its only
> outgoings are the annual accountant + corporate registration fees, which
> I pay on its behalf.

For 25 years?  :O
Domain name?  Secure data center.  Must be other stuff...
No one knows this stuff.  Thank you for telling us.  And thank you for doing
that all for so very long.

> Fair question. The answer is that our 'end users' are more than those
> who participate here or download POV-Ray for personal use. POV-Ray is
> used by people who have code generated by programs or scripts (e.g. in
> molecular modeling, academia in general). How many of these still remain
> I don't know as they aren't required to tell us about it but my
> understanding is it's not uncommon. These users don't deal with the
> program in the same way you do - many aren't familiar with SDL and use
> POV simply as part of a tool chain.

I suspected as much, and have corresponded with a few of these people, and
posted some results of searches I have done on a few occasions.  While searching
for the Pty Ltd, I cam across a custom cabinet company that uses POV-Ray to
model their stuff...  :D

> While I consider you guys (by which I mean anyone who uses it for fun)
> as our primary user base I still need to care about other classes of
> users. While you guys here may be able to adapt to a breaking change in
> the way SDL works (either in syntax or in the way an image renders) in
> many cases those who use POV from generated SDL won't have the knowledge
> or means to fix it. They should be able to download the latest official
> version from our website and just have it work as expected if this is at
> all possible.

Understandable - perhaps 3.8 beta might never become 3.8 official, and just
leap-frog right over to 4.0.0-alpha

> ... any 3.x release needs to stay
> stable - both in terms of output and in terms of not crashing when
> someone does a multi-day render (memory leaks can be a bitch).

True.  But I usually break it right out of the gate.   ;)


> I think you're the first person who has ever asked me about the company
> (or if not then it was a long time ago).

One of my Chem professors once looked at me oddly when I inquired about the
inorganic byproducts of the reaction we were covering.  "You're the first person
who's ever asked that."   :D


> Honestly at this stage I think the best thing I personally could do to
> spice things up is get Moray out, even if it's a binary only release. It
> means diving into code I didn't write and don't understand but it's at
> least a solid target, and who knows, I may even enjoy it.

Sounds exactly like the psychotic projects I take on.  :D

> But as far as 3.8 goes, yes it will happen but when I can't say as we
> have to solve the manpower problem. See my followup regarding your
> question about what a release manager needs to do (may be a day or two
> before I post that, let's see how much free time I have later today).
>
> -- Chris

Once again - thanks for taking the time to relay all of that information and
just - talk about things.

Post a reply to this message

Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:

> Even if it generated a fork similar to MegaPOV as a "research fork", that
> might increase interest in the main branch development.

I'm not sure what might draw people in - but it could be anything.

There are job-search sites, and perhaps there are types of job headings that
requests for developers could be listed under.  A shiny ray-traced graphic or
two and a link to the HOF could pique someone's interest.

Social media, image hosting sites, YouTube, gaming sites, other forums, math
sites, programming sites - you name it - you never know what will pop up in
someone's search results, or get their attention in a forum or comment section.

I used to do some guerilla marketing for stuff like this, and I said - "What's
popular?"
Movies, music, bands, tattoos, 3D printing, ...
Surely here and there a few people could do what they already know and raytrace
a few simple Movie stills, titles, band logos, tattoo designs, etc. and post
them where they might grab people's attention.  "Made with POV-Ray v3.X"
Ask about a POV-Ray problem in a math or graphics forum.  I'm doing this thing
in _POV-Ray_, and....
Like just work it in anywhere, once a day.  Link to it, mention it, find a way
to post/attach/integrate even the smallest, simplest render...
I took another approach to possibly direct traffic to a site once, and paid for
an email address through their domain (also as a way to donate and support
them).  If people got email from Me### [at] POV-Rayorg, then someone will eventually
wonder WTH POV-Ray.org _IS_.   Enough people using that type of email as an
address, and you get a sort of de-facto marketing campaign just as a byproduct
of people going about their daily business.

Literally anything could trigger someone to visit the site and become interested
- which then goes on to become word-of-mouth as well.

Live coding.
A short tutorial on some easy topic that gets covered in EVERY undergraduate
math/physics/comp sci/graphics class.
A code example in SDL for a commonly searched algorithm.
An interview with POV-Team members or Newsgroup artists.
I see people post "fan art" for social media sites.  "Hey, that's cool - you did
that with .... POV-Ray?"
Wikipedia illustrations - we already have a few people doing that.





And putting something right at the top of the web page would be the first thing
I'd do.
"Looking for developers, debuggers, beta-testers...."
"Here's what we need:   1.    2.    3.       "

Post a reply to this message

On 23/07/2020 10:57, Bald Eagle wrote:
> Yes...  but it seems ---- not right.
> When one volunteers, it's usually assumed that it's not - done in a vacuum.
> One might volunteer at a soup kitchen, but at least call in when sick or
> quitting.

The fact he stopped doing anything at all on github for almost a year
suggests to me that it's probably more than the fact he just doesn't
want to work on POV (though that's just conjecture on my part). It could
be he just got fed up with me or POV in general, he could have been
abducted by aliens, or maybe he was unwell. He doesn't need to tell us
if he doesn't want (though of course I would have liked to know).

Whatever the case, I'm grateful for the work he put in and was quietly
hoping he'd return, but if it's not to be then it's not to be.

>> When discussing how to move forward on our dev mail list the point was
>> raised that we probably need to inspect some of his more recent changes
>> as we simply don't know if they were intended to be complete or a
>> work-in-progress. If in doing so we find or suspect the latter to be the
>> case then we need to work out what to do: try to finish it or remove it.
> 
> Is there a method to doing that?  A checklist?

Basically it's manual inspection of each change checked into git by
someone experienced enough with C++ and the internals of POV-Ray to
understand what they are reading and how it could affect the rest of the
codebase.

> (And you keep saying "we".  You can tell us who everyone is, right?  It's a
> secret cabal of international raytracing developers, isn't it...)

There's currently 9 members of the dev list; if they want to identify
themselves they are free to post here. While it's not a secret I still
need to respect their privacy as some may not consider themselves a
contributor (or at least anymore). For example there's a few members who
haven't posted for a few years.

If you want to know who works on the core code of 3.8, with Christoph
gone unless we get more help it's basically going to be me.

>> outgoings are the annual accountant + corporate registration fees, which
>> I pay on its behalf.
> 
> For 25 years?  :O

Less than 20 years (not sure of the date we incorporated but it was
after 2000).

> Domain name?  Secure data center.  Must be other stuff...

'Secure data center' is basically any decent colocation place these
days; i.e. you can't just show up and wander around as there's equipment
from dozens or hundreds of companies. I only made that mention in
respect of your thought that DB could assist.

> I suspected as much, and have corresponded with a few of these people, and
> posted some results of searches I have done on a few occasions.  While searching

I also forgot to mention another class of user: those who are into 3d
modelling but don't hand-code SDL. There's a few modellers that have
plugins that generate SDL for consumption by POV (though typically they
just output meshes). Don't want to break those, either, if I can help
it, though changes that affect them are more likely to be visual than
SDL-related as their output is fairly simple.

> Understandable - perhaps 3.8 beta might never become 3.8 official, and just
> leap-frog right over to 4.0.0-alpha

Yes but then I'd have to deal with all the complaints that 4.0 was
intended to be a re-write :-) ... honestly there's no real reason to go
to 4.0, 3.8 is fine as long as we get our ducks in a row (exactly which
type of duck and how many rows is a topic I'll cover in the post about
the release process).

> Once again - thanks for taking the time to relay all of that information and
> just - talk about things.

No problem, it's good to discuss stuff like this as it helps clear
misconceptions. Having been with the project for such a long time I
simply don't know what people do or don't know; some things I take for
granted might be mysterious to others.

-- Chris

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On Wed, 22 Jul 2020 21:41:43 -0400, Bald Eagle wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> 
>> Even if it generated a fork similar to MegaPOV as a "research fork",
>> that might increase interest in the main branch development.
> 
[...]

All great ideas IMO.

My thought was particularly with SIGGRAPH, their focus is graphics 
research.  I was a member back in my college days (back when I was a lot 
more actively playing with POV-Ray+Moray) with a student membership, but 
when I left college, I had to drop the membership (couldn't afford the 
non-student rate).  ISTR reading that early in the pandemic, ACM made 
access to their publications free for all, but I don't know if that's 
still the case (or if all publications were included).

(As an aside, *this* is the type of positive conversation I was 
referencing in other parts of the thread - this is a discussion I 
consider helpful and productive.  THANK YOU for engaging in it, one user 
to another.)

-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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On 23/07/2020 11:41, Bald Eagle wrote:
> I'm not sure what might draw people in - but it could be anything.
> 
> There are job-search sites, and perhaps there are types of job headings that
> requests for developers could be listed under.  A shiny ray-traced graphic or
> two and a link to the HOF could pique someone's interest.

I considered reaching out to some of my contacts in .edu-land to see if
I could get some interested students. However I decided not to (at least
at this point), for two reasons: firstly, past experience has shown that
asking for volunteers from /outside/ the user community rarely results
in someone who sticks around for long enough to become helpful. The
person really needs to genuinely be interested in POV-Ray itself, and if
they are then it's likely they'll approach us (or we'll hear of some
work they've been doing).

Secondly, in depth-work on povray can be *hard* to get right. Sure, it's
easy to make tweaks here and there but to really work on the program as
a whole you need to have a solid grasp on how everything works together
as adding what appears to be a simple feature has the potential, in some
cases, to do really unexpected things *if* you don't know how it works
as a whole. To get a developer up to speed on the guts as a whole takes
time. Plus whoever it is needs to be really competent with C++ and
unmanaged languages (by which I mean having to do your own memory
management).

That said, I can see where we *could* use a student or less-experienced
developer who wanted to round out their background a bit: it would be
great to have someone formally document the inner workings in a detailed
form (i.e. at least enough so that someone who doesn't know how
everything fits together could read it and understand). This would make
getting up to speed on the codebase for anyone who wants to do so a fair
bit easier and would also help in splitting it into bits for the 4.0
rewrite.

But that's a lot of work ...

Honestly there are just so many open-source projects around the world
these days - many of which are way more glamorous than POV while also
being easier to work on - that I kind of understand why we have little
luck in attracting volunteers.

Now if I can get moray integrated with POV and all working nicely then
we'd have a bit more bling and maybe could attract some help, but even
then I have my doubts. Many people seem to think GPU raytracing is the
future and software renderers are dead but simply don't understand that
at this point GPU's are still incapable of the level of precision and
generic applicability that a fully primitive-based renderer is, and I
don't see that changing anytime soon (as there's no real need to).

Sorry if I sound negative and I'm not trying to be a wet sponge here.
I'm just tired I guess. Good reason to have someone who's a bit more
optimistic driving release cycles. But you know what? Despite the fact
this thread has been a bit, um, rowdy, it's shown me that there's still
a bunch of people who do care and has helped improve my feelings about
the whole thing. I might even enjoy getting stuck back into the code,
time will tell.

-- Chris

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