On Fri, 21 Sep 2001 09:25:15 +0200, Alessandro Coppo wrote:
>Ron Parker wrote:
>
>> Also very hard to make cross-platform.  But we're getting there.
>
>How many plaforms are you going to support? Anything Windows related has 
>.dll's, anything UNIX related has .so's and I think that anything Mac 
>related has similar mechanisms. By the way, VMS had shared libraries in 
>the late 1980's... The ONLY platform I know for sure that has nothing 
>like these tools is MS-DOS!

The problem isn't how many platforms we're going to support, it's how to
make sure that every plugin is available for every platform when the
plugins are being developed and distributed by random people on the 'net.
It's not much good to be able to use POV on your Mac if you can't get
the newest whiz-bang plugin that's needed to render every tenth scene
in povray.text.scene-files.  That leads to fragmentation of the language
and eventually something that looks a lot like forking into lots of little
OS-dependent versions of POV.

Don't get me wrong.  I like the plugin idea.  I used to be all for it.  But
then someone told me what I'm telling you (though probably more eloquently)
and I changed my mind about the whole thing.  After that, I got dragged 
kicking and screaming into managing the Unix port while our Unix guy deals
with an extreme bout of Real Life, and I became even more convinced that
if we added plugins, the only plugins you'd ever see would be distributed
as binary-only Windows DLLs that only work on a Pentium IV running at 2GHz
or higher.

-- 
plane{-z,-3normal{crackle scale.2#local a=5;#while(a)warp{repeat x flip x}rotate
z*60#local a=a-1;#end translate-9*x}pigment{rgb 1}}light_source{-9red 1rotate 60
*z}light_source{-9rgb y rotate-z*60}light_source{9-z*18rgb z}text{ttf"arial.ttf"
"RP".01,0translate-<.6,.4,.02>pigment{bozo}}light_source{-z*3rgb-.2}//Ron Parker

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