William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Includes like
> functions.inc, math.inc etc will stay. Things like colors.inc etc and
> anything else in there not current with v38 will not be part of the core
> povr repository.

Let me just say that I'm a fan of the military mindset of "if it's detachable,
you'll lose it."
We all have some inc file that has been lost on someone's HD or only ever
existed on a now-defunct hosting site (Geocities, etc)
Things like functions and vectors and math seem so integral to the operation (at
least for me) that I'd think part of the restructuring would be to move the
externally loaded and implemented inc file code into the source where it is
always accessible and orders of magnitude faster.

> I believe even in POV-Ray we should move to a code repository model
> which is much less monolithic. A github repository for scene files, one
> for documentation, one for includes and one for the code.


For all of the ancillary material, I would vote for something:
1. easily maintained, and maintainable by several people
2. easily accessible.
      (POV-Ray already has a steep learning curve, and requiring people to then
learn git might be too much)
3. Easily indexed and cross referenced.
      (I would love a way to better search the archives for inc and scene files
based on certain topics, keywords, etc.)

Web-based searching and indexing immediately comes to mind simply because it's
so widespread and so many people can code that stuff in little time.   Not
saying that's THE way to do it - but making it compatible/friendly to that
approach would be a good thing to do from the start.

Maybe take a poll of the problems people have experienced in the past with all
manner of POV-Ray things, and use that as a guide for "Well, we certainly don't
want to do THAT again..."

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