hi,

William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> On 6/15/20 7:34 AM, jr wrote:
> > William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> >> On 6/14/20 8:48 AM, Mr wrote:
> >>> William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> >> ...
> >> I want to get rid of the ini system and move to just flags.
> >
> > that would be a shame, I think.  personally, I find .ini files increasingly
> > useful, as they allow me to quick render the wip with just "povray name", or
> > (when it matters) "povray name[final]"; also, having multiple sections allows me
> > to render the same image with different "environments", ie library_paths, so
> > different versions of the same .inc files can be used.
>
> I'll think about this some more.

you could always just mark it as 'deprecated'.  :-)

> I don't myself use the ini system much beyond what's automatic - and the
> POVINI environment variable. My belief is in a *nux environment the
> usual shells / scripting languages and environment variables will do.
> It's how I mostly do things, but... ?

I do not use the environment variable.  initially I thought that .ini files are
useful only for animations, but have since come to appreciate them for other
uses.

you're right, I guess, that with BASH, awk, Tcl, etc, everything seems to be ..
well catered for.  still, the .ini, being "specialist" for the application, has
its place, imo.

> My thinking is losing the ini mechanism will simplify the code and
> documentation. Plus unix types are used to $PATH etc. Maybe I'm fooling
> myself though. Almost always once I get into something for real, it's
> more complicated than I imagined. :-)

I guess that you not being a user of .ini files does not help.  :-)  perhaps, as
Bald Eagle suggested else-thread, a poll of actual and potential users, asking
their opinion on (desired) features/functionality?

(there's an .ini file processing utility in tcllib1.18.  ;-))


regards, jr.

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