Ron Parker wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 02 Sep 1999 17:55:20 -0400, Dennis Clarke
> <dcl### [at] interlogcom> wrote:
> 
> >Geez ...  I'm certain that Sun will lend you a Sun Ultra 2 for the purpose.  It
wouldn't
> >take more than a week to get the build optimized and ready to roll.  Where are you
located
> >though?  Australia?
> 
> Personally, I'm in Indiana.  But it's an ongoing process, you see... A
> loaner wouldn't do the job, because next thing you know someone would
> want a Solaris 7 build of 3.5, then whatever version comes after that,
> and so on.  It's best if there's someone who has full-time access to
> whatever hardware is being supported.  That's the case for all of the
> currently supported platforms.
> 
> Of course, nothing's stopping you from building your own custom
> UltraSparc version and burning it on a CD-R.

I see your point.  I'm going to go way way out on a limb here.  You see, I just happen
to
have a bit of Sun hardware at home.  I'm a Solaris fan and a general unix type
user/programmer and administrator.  In general, I have been using unix off and on for
over
17 years and have found the very highest performance and reliability to be in the unix
world.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I spent some time as a systems administrator
for
an IBM 3090 mainframe farm for Pratt & Whitney.  To say the least, the sheer number
crunching ability of an IBM mainframe is, well, a real eye opener.  In any case, if I
had
access to an IBM S390 today then I'd port POV-Ray to mainframe and see what happens. 
Thats not going to happen any time soon.  In the meantime I have two Sun Sparc 20
servers
here with a Fibre based storage array as well as my workstation which is a Sun Ultra
10. 
I also have an old AST Premmia GX with dual P90's as my ppp connection to the
internet. 
That would explain why my message posts are all from a  Mozilla 4.61 [en] (X11; U;
SunOS
5.5.1 i86pc) X-Mailer client.  That would be because I run Solaris 2.5.1 on the x86
based
AST machine because it is rock solid stable.  All the other Sun machines run Solaris
7.  I
also have a slew of NT and Win9x stuff with some Red-Hat Linux machines thrown in for
good
measure.  If you check my web page at
http://www.interlog.com/~dclarke/povray/povray.html
you will see that I've spent some time building my own binaries for the POV-Ray
program.  

So why not simply ask me to compile the code for you on the Sparc, UltraSparc and x86
platforms and then you can post the binaries as official on the povray web site and be
up
to date.  I can not understand why you ( the Pov-Ray team ) would not simply get a
reasonable consultant to do the compile for you and then post the binaries in the same
way
that Linux is posted.  Up to date.  The absence of a decent UNIX ( other than Linux )
just
screams a simple message.  You can guess the message.

Dennis Clarke

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