Chris, thank you very much for taking the time to very extensively talk about
the many and varied topics that have been brought up.  I'm sure what you've
worked to address has been on a lot of people's minds in one way or another for
years.

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

> Well here's the problem. Yes Christoph worked hard on it. But we simply
> do not know if he considers the work complete or not. He just vanished.
> We don't know why (and nor does he need to tell us; he's a volunteer and
> can do as he pleases)

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.
We had a volunteer fire department/rescue squad in one of the towns I lived in,
and one would have expected that they'd use the taxpayer-purchased equipment and
training to -- you know - rescue people.   For some reason they sat outside a
friend's burning building for hours like cowards while he died of smoke
inhalation.
.... and now we're moving on ...


> 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?
(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...)


> > it would be helpful to anyone considering it to know what "managing the release"
> > typically entails.
>
> I'll answer that in a separate followup.

Thanks - that will be interesting and informative.


> It's still in CT but was moved into a secured datacenter a number of
> years ago.

And here's one of the parts that mystifies me --- all of that costs ... money.

> ... I think the
> current backup is about 200GB in total (though the core content such as
> databases and website content is much less - 200GB includes stuff like
> log files, OS binaries and everything).

Interesting.   It would be cool to see if there's a software that could split
everything up into directories, like images, includes, etc. with date codes to
differentiate the various versions (screen.inc and bordered characters have had
quite a few...)
I suppose even a few simple recursive directory searches that returned the
number of different file types would be interesting.  3D column chart over
time...  ;)



> > _copy_ the content, lest a HDD crash wipe out nearly 25 years of images, scene
> > files, includes, etc.
>
> Fully understand your concern and it's one of my worries as well. New
> system has RAID, the old one is a single spinning disk now (used to
> be RAID but that controller died a long time ago). However the data is
> well protected: there's an external SSD plugged into it that gets a
> nightly backup via a cron job, plus I run a nightly rsync from my office
> which keeps a full copy of the server contents here in Australia. If the
> disk died the most that would be lost would be maybe a day's worth of data.

Impressive.  Also good to know.



> As part of this process
> they advised (paraphrasing, I don't recall the exact words) that it
> would be wise to have a legal entity to hold the intellectual property.
> Hence the company.

Right.  I figured it was something like that.


> If you refer to Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd., then no and
> no. It has never spent anything and has never received funds. Its only
> outgoings are the annual accountant + corporate registration fees, which
> I pay on its behalf.

For 25 years?  :O
Domain name?  Secure data center.  Must be other stuff...
No one knows this stuff.  Thank you for telling us.  And thank you for doing
that all for so very long.

> Fair question. The answer is that our 'end users' are more than those
> who participate here or download POV-Ray for personal use. POV-Ray is
> used by people who have code generated by programs or scripts (e.g. in
> molecular modeling, academia in general). How many of these still remain
> I don't know as they aren't required to tell us about it but my
> understanding is it's not uncommon. These users don't deal with the
> program in the same way you do - many aren't familiar with SDL and use
> POV simply as part of a tool chain.

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
for the Pty Ltd, I cam across a custom cabinet company that uses POV-Ray to
model their stuff...  :D

> While I consider you guys (by which I mean anyone who uses it for fun)
> as our primary user base I still need to care about other classes of
> users. While you guys here may be able to adapt to a breaking change in
> the way SDL works (either in syntax or in the way an image renders) in
> many cases those who use POV from generated SDL won't have the knowledge
> or means to fix it. They should be able to download the latest official
> version from our website and just have it work as expected if this is at
> all possible.

Understandable - perhaps 3.8 beta might never become 3.8 official, and just
leap-frog right over to 4.0.0-alpha

> ... any 3.x release needs to stay
> stable - both in terms of output and in terms of not crashing when
> someone does a multi-day render (memory leaks can be a bitch).

True.  But I usually break it right out of the gate.   ;)


> I think you're the first person who has ever asked me about the company
> (or if not then it was a long time ago).

One of my Chem professors once looked at me oddly when I inquired about the
inorganic byproducts of the reaction we were covering.  "You're the first person
who's ever asked that."   :D


> Honestly at this stage I think the best thing I personally could do to
> spice things up is get Moray out, even if it's a binary only release. It
> means diving into code I didn't write and don't understand but it's at
> least a solid target, and who knows, I may even enjoy it.

Sounds exactly like the psychotic projects I take on.  :D

> But as far as 3.8 goes, yes it will happen but when I can't say as we
> have to solve the manpower problem. See my followup regarding your
> question about what a release manager needs to do (may be a day or two
> before I post that, let's see how much free time I have later today).
>
> -- Chris

Once again - thanks for taking the time to relay all of that information and
just - talk about things.

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