Hi folks,

there's other stuff that needs to be done, which should be easy to 
delegate, at least partially:

During my absence, I gather other people have stepped up and done some 
error diagnosis and coming up with fixes. At least Bill's name has come 
up a couple of times.

Now, if we want those fixes to make their way into official POV-Ray, 
some steps need to happen - all essentially boiling down to getting the 
information to a place and into a format where it can be more easily 
managed:


(1) Information on errors not yet diagnosed, currently spread across 
countless threads on multiple newsgroups, needs to be collected in one 
central place, where the status of each issue can be easily tracked and 
updated, and the error itself easily referenced.

Before I went hiding, the ideal place for that was the Issues section on 
GitHub (https://github.com/POV-Ray/povray/issues).

If you want to help me help you help us all and get those bugs fixed, I 
guess that's still the best place. I don't currently have the energy to 
dig through old threads and sift the information out there, but I guess 
some of you folks could help out with that.

Ideally, the prcess of collecting that information would involve 
"distilling it down" to a simple test case, with a minimalistic scene 
and concise description. Plus a link to the newsgroup thread for reference.


(2) In a similar vein, information on errors already diagnosed, but 
still without a suggested solution, also need to be collected and 
"distilled".

Again I would suggest the issues tracker on GitHub. I'd recommend to put 
the description of symptoms into the issue description proper, and add 
the diagnostic findings as a comment.


(3) For errors that have been diagnosed, and for which a solution has 
already been found, it might need to be wise to also add them to the 
issue tracker. More importantly, however, the solution has to be placed 
in a place and into a form that makes it easy to "import" it into the 
POV-Ray codebase.

Before I went hiding, the ideal format for that would have been a Git 
Pull Request.

I'm aware that might not be everyone's favorite format, but maybe you 
folks can team up, with someone producing diffs and someone else 
bringing them into Git? (I myself am terrible at working with diffs, so 
don't expect me to touch them except with a 10 foot stick.)

A single pull request per issue would be preferable, and changes should 
be based on a recent version from the master branch.


Two important things I'd like to note:

(A) Make sure to coordinate with others, in case there's more than one 
person to pick up this gauntlet.

(B) Be prepared for feedback that may sound rejecting - it is generally 
not meant that way. Whoever will review the error report or proposed 
solution _will_ be thankful for the time and effort you're putting into 
it. And they _will_ be even more thankful for any _additional_ time and 
effort you might be willing to give in case they find a snag with the 
proposed solution. Software developers just generally tend to not be 
very good at conveying such sentiments.


Am I scaring you away already?
I hope I'm not.

I'm grateful for anyone willing to put time and effort into this, so 
that POV-Ray v3.8 gets the bugfixes it deserves. Every little bit helps.

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