Hi!

In order to assist the users of POV-Ray on Unix and related platforms,
it's useful for me to know what it is people want.  This will help me to
prioritize platform-specific development.  I can guess, but I find that
asking works better.  I know of no better place to go to get user
feedback from the users of POV-Ray on Unix than this newsgroup.  You
could do me a favor by answering the following questions.  Feel free to
either respond on this news server or to email me.  I'm not interested
in marketing data, selling email addresses, or any of that underhanded
stuff, but I suspect you already figured that out.  I've asked some of
these questions here before, but I'm looking to correlate them with
other data.

OK, here are the questions:

1) Under what operating systems do you use POV-Ray? Please be specific
as to e.g. Linux distributions, versions, and so forth.  Multiple
answers are fine.

2) Do you want POV-Ray for Unix to have an official GUI front-end for
your platform? Please indicate which one(s) if you list several
platforms.

3) Would you want such a front-end to have a built-in editor?

4) Any preference on languages/GUI libraries on such a front end, pro or
con? (Tcl/Tk, Perl/Tk, Python Tkinter, Java AWT, gtk+, Gnome, KDE,
Motif/Lesstif)

5) What editor do you use for editing .pov files?

6) What format(s) do you prefer for documentation? (HTML, ASCII, PDF,
ps, man, info, Word document, etc.)

7) What sort of package management do you prefer for precompiled
binaries? 

8) What unofficial version(s) of POV-Ray (e.g. MegaPov, PVMPOV) do you
use on a regular basis?

What I plan to get from this:
1) Insight into the platforms for which official binaries perhaps ought
to exist, used with 2, 3, and 4 to determine the operating systems(s)
for which there is the strongest demand for a GUI, which in turn will
help determine the language/toolkit used.
2) Related to the second part of 1.  Given the eventuality of an
official GUI for Unix, this lets me know what platforms it needs to run
on, which again affects the choice of language/toolkit.  In any event,
the core renderer will remain available from the command line.
3) While the last thing Unix needs is another text editor, I may be
included to include one given
sufficient interest.  Or I might do it on a lark, for which I'd hope
you'd forgive me. ;-)
4) Related to 2.  This is one of the big questions from a practical
standpoint.  The fact that it's still a question gives you some idea of
where development is on an official front-end at this point (put on the
back burner until 3.5 is further along).  This also lets me know whether
anyone hates any of the options (Tk is ugly, Motif is ugly, Gnome/KDE is
the subject of a religious war, Gnome and KDE aren't necessarily that
portable to some of the commercial Unices)
5) Related to 3.  This gives me some idea of what users might want from
an editor, if one gets included.  I'm also just curious.
6) Lets me know what documentation format Unix users want shipped with
POV-Ray.  There are tradeoffs involved (ascii: universally supported,
trivially searched, available on a console; HTML: widely supported,
supports images, reasonably searchable, available over a network; PDF:
fairly widely supported, supports images, most visually attractive). 
Word documents aren't a serious suggestion, but they're one of the
formats we have for 3.1, so I'm laying it on the table for folks to hiss
at. ;-)
7) Lets me know what package formats I might want to add.  Tarballs will
always remain available, but I'm looking into adding other options, and
I'm wondering how much interest there is.
8) Lets me know what folks are using.  Mostly to satisfy my curiosity.

Some of the things that were asked about in my last survey have happily
been rendered (no pun intended) moot.  Specifically, the demand for a
configure/make/make install has been addressed, and there's now just one
binary that uses whatever form of display makes the most sense in the
context.  I have a version of MegaPov with these changes that I'd like
to see tested widely before I decide to put them into 3.5.  It's a
little rough at this point, and I'm sure I've made lots of beginner's
mistakes, but it seems to beat the living daylights out of the current
system, and it's going to make my life a whole lot easier from here on
out.  Once I'm done with documentation, it will be made available.  Look
for it
in a few days.

-Mark Gordon

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