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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Op 23/07/2020 om 03:57 schreef Chris Cason:
> On 23/07/2020 10:57, Bald Eagle wrote:
[snip]
> 
>> 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
> 

Just to say that I truly appreciate all this. Many things have become 
more transparent to me now. For long, I have been worried that somehow 
POV-Ray would just fade away slowly. I understand that that is not going 
to be the case and I am grateful for all your(*) good and dedicated work 
which has permitted the creation of some amazing art. I am still 
learning every day from those and trying to improve what I do. There 
seems to be no end to it... (except maybe that age and health begin to 
seriously take their implacable toll).

I do not like "rowdy" discussions and I regret that such have emerged 
here. Perhaps it is well to realise (again) that written communication 
through (international) newsgroups like this has their dangers. We are 
all members of very different communities and with very different 
languages and/or ways of behaving. I know from experience how subtle 
English in particular needs to be used in order not be misunderstood by 
native speakers. Don't trust those 'aliens' who claim to be fluent 
speakers (especially when they are Dutch!) by the way. ;-)  This is a 
good way to communicate across the globe but it has limitations not 
always clear to all.

(*)including of course all those who contributed actively over the years.

-- 
Thomas

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

it takes two to tango.  you used "*plonk*" in your previous message, (I think)
to emphasise the .. finality.  do you want to change your mind?  because both of
us would need to be willing to .. climb down.  the offer: you stop conducting
your, um, witch hunt, and I will keep my tongue in check.


(tentative) regards, jr.

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On 23.07.2020 00:36, Chris Cason wrote:
> (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).

When I came in in 1997 the diffs were all posted on Compuserve, iirc. I 
am pretty sure I still have a dump of that, and an old PowerMac 7200 
that might even have a backup and a "running" Compuserve client that 
iirc worked offline as well.

Thorsten

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On 23/07/2020 17:52, Thorsten wrote:
> When I came in in 1997 the diffs were all posted on Compuserve, iirc. I 
> am pretty sure I still have a dump of that, and an old PowerMac 7200 
> that might even have a backup and a "running" Compuserve client that 
> iirc worked offline as well.

Now that you mention it I'm sure you're right, it wasn't email. I used
to use an offline reader (ozcis, later ozwin) and I'm certain I still
have many of the messages that it cached from the forums. Provided the
diffs were uploaded as messages (not files) they ought to be in there.

That said however I'm not sure how useful they'd be since unless they
have descriptions akin to check-in log messages they won't be
particularly informative plus if we wanted to put them into something
like git to make examination of source history easier we'd need to
reconstruct the exact source tree they were patching against.

(Also if I recall correctly I often needed to manually adjust patches as
they didn't always apply cleanly, but that's just the nature of using
diff/patch I guess ;)

-- Chris

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On 23/07/2020 05:15, Bald Eagle wrote:
> A short 2-3 lines of text on the website about that would take care of any
> misconceptions - even by new users.

Went to add this and realized I probably am not the best person to word
it as I'm looking from the inside. I'd rather have it worded by a user
in the way they think best sets it out. Would you like to make a suggestion?

(Also feel free to suggest where it should go: I assumed the news
section on the front page, but that may not be best as it will scroll
down over time).

-- Chris

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

> Went to add this and realized I probably am not the best person to word
> it as I'm looking from the inside. I'd rather have it worded by a user
> in the way they think best sets it out. Would you like to make a suggestion?

At the moment, the major 4 points that I see are:

Moray was NOT 'given' to the POV-Ray project.
[You] personally purchased it from the author.
[It's a LOT more complicated and layered than most people think and there's no
one to work on it][And you're looking for developers - otherwise it may never
happen][When it's DONE, you will donate it it - but NOT until then - because you
CAN'T]
Lutz has recently added STL import/export.

So, perhaps make another post just talking about it - How many pieces, how many
layers, how many things need to be "clean room" rewritten, etc, and I or someone
else can probably distill that down into a short, concise blurb that removes all
confusion and mystery.

> (Also feel free to suggest where it should go: I assumed the news
> section on the front page, but that may not be best as it will scroll
> down over time).

The HOME section has "tabs" (Welcome, Download and Navigation, Contacting us,
....) so perhaps another such tab could be added.   Other forums have "stickies"
that stay "pinned" to the top of the list of threads and topics.
Some forums have sections that are only open (writable) for admin.  Perhaps that
would be a good way to post FAQ / "static" information.

There's also the Moray web page, in case anyone approaches things starting from
there.

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On 23/07/2020 21:05, Bald Eagle wrote:
> At the moment, the major 4 points that I see are:
[snip]

Perhaps I misunderstood: I thought you meant an update about the POV
project rather than moray?

-- Chris

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