I'm using MegaPov (still 0.5a) as a testbed for some of the
platform-specific enhancements I've been playing with.  Since the
changes are Unix-specific, I decided it made the most sense to announce
it here.

- configure script.  Should be simple: ./configure; make; su; make
install
Please let me know if you have any problems! This is a pretty rough
draft, and I'd like to get the bugs out of it.  If you have a Unix
system you can test this on, you would be doing me a favor by trying
this out and letting me know how it goes.

- one big executable.  There's now just one binary that generates the
right kind of display based on the context in which it is executed.  
Specifics: 
--if you have $DISPLAY set or pass --display on the command line, you
get X preview.
--if you're at the console, and either you're root or you have MegaPov
suid root, you get SVGA preview.
--if none of the above (you're at the console as pondscum, you're in a
telnet session without specifying a --display, etc.), you get ASCII.
Let me know if anyone has any other needs not met by this.
This is conditionally compiled, so it should compile fine on machines
that don't have X or SVGAlib.

- I'm leaving out the libpng and zlib source code, since libpng
especially doesn't play well with the configure script.  Maybe if I find
a way (lots of m4 and shell scripts, I suppose), I'll put it back later.

- The precompiled binary requires X and SVGA libraries.  If you don't
have these, you'll have to either get them or compile your own from the
source.  I'll look into ways around this in the future.

- RPM's available for those using Red Hat and related Linux
distributions.  I'm going to look into .deb versions.

- The source code has been rearranged a bit to make it easier to use
autoconf and automake.  The arrangement is also a bit more GNUish, for
similar reasons.

- automake provides all the GNU-standard Makefile targets.

- The docs and sample scenes now come with the source or binaries, as
appropriate.

As usual, the files live at
http://www.mailbag.com/users/mtgordon/megapov.html

-Mark Gordon

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