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

> After around 30 years with the project I see my role as more a steward; a maintainer
of stability and backwards compa
tibility than a developer of 'new things'
.....
> One of the reasons we moved to the AGPL was to encourage other people to fork POV
and experiment, and this has happen
ed to a certain extent. Those forks are the place to go if you want to try out new
ideas.
.....
> -- Chris (current team leader and developer since the Compuserve days).

I do hope that you have some notes that would give future developers a broad
overview / flowchart about how everything under-the-hood works, and any of those
1000's of tidbits of data concerning why x, y, or z was or was not implemented,
or was implemented in a certain way.

In a sense, there are people "developing" POV-Ray by adapting code for various
algorithms, libraries, and desired features from languages like javascript, c++,
C, python, Fortran, etc. to SDL, so at least the features are usable, even
though they're glacially slow.

I think it would be great if there was some sort of short guidebook that
outlined the necessary and sufficient basics of how to implement new keywords,
primitives, functions, etc. so that anyone considering learning enough to make a
fork or take the time and effort to learn the skills to contribute to 3.8, 3.9,
4.0 would have a definite goal and roadmap to get there.

Also, IIRC, there was a major change from 3.6 to 3.7 in terms of threads or
internal messaging, or both ... idk - but it would probably be worth pointing
out the details of that, so that introductory attempts at monkeying with the
source code were done with the simpler version where there is less to break, and
then once the basic proof of concept is a fait accompli, the code could be
inserted into a newer, more complicated version.

I'm not sure what sorts of materials exist that have been "for developer eyes
only" - but perhaps those could be made available somewhere on the website so
that it's preserved, and accessible to anyone interested in learning how
everything works.

- Bill

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