In article <3c0ff1d7.41227138@news.povray.org> , ken### [at] uniplanit (Angelo 
'kENpEX' Pesce) wrote:

> I mailed Warp, and he told me to post in the newsgroup, so I
> configured my news reader, downloaded all the past msgs and since I
> saw a similar post in povray.programming I posted my own stuff (about
> pov4 since I knew that pov3.5 was fixed)...
> And this is the story, now we have a huge huge thread and at the
> beginning someone told not so nice things too, but I don't feel that I
> did anything wrong.

What surprises me is that all people who suggest features that they have
seen in commercial packages always assume their suggestion to add this and
that feature to POV-Ray is new.  I mean, come on, do you really think we are
all that ignorant to not know what features other/commercial packages have?

Besides, Warp's FAQ already explains why your suggestions 5 and 8.  The FAQ
also explains that POV-Ray is not a sole triangle mesh renderer, yet you
ignore this suggestion and suggest 7.

The 3.5 announcement from Sept. 2000 which you read as you know the feature
set in 3.5 is final (as you said yourself) mentions that patches that are
not included were not included because they have problems.  This doesn't
keep you from suggesting 3.

Your suggestion 4 is in the manual.  At least in the 3.5 manual there is no
more excuse for not at least checking the manual to find the focal blur
feature to find out about how it works and that it already does what you
suggest.

And you must have been aware that suggestion 1, which would *break* any
scene written before POV-Ray 4.0.  It really should not have been difficult
to guess the response to such a suggestion (hence my idea that you are only
looking for a flamewar in my first reply).

Your second suggestion isn't more diplomatic.  After all you could have
checked before saying something.  What you imply is that you know how it is
working (or what it is not doing) without ever looking at it and that
because it doesn't do what you think is fastest it is in your opinion slow.
And last but not least you really insult every developer by saying "It's
very important to speed up the whole thing."  Do you think we don't know
that a ray tracer needs to be fast?

I know myself that it isn't easy to always express ideas well in a foreign
language.  In fact it can be extremely difficult.  Unfortunately that isn't
your problem.

What you did wrong is to simply ignore the documentation and source code,
then post suggestions based on your random assumptions which you obviously
had the ability to validate first, and then expect everybody to be happy
that you suggested something everybody knew already.

The fact that you did not bother to check is the only thing that upsets me.
You have the ability to do so yet you decided to imply your ideas are so
unique you should make the suggestion anyway ... doing so simply implies
that you think you know better and thus we are just waiting for your
suggestions.  in particular you then declare your suggestions a "wish list",
which is not exactly an invitation to discussing the implementation but more
the feasibility, which is precisely what happened.

The lack of first checking the obvious was also what promoted me to suggest
"Looks like you have a few misconceptions about POV-Ray", which might have
prompted you to conclude that this might indeed be the case and you did
simply overlook or not find some information.  However, you never asked for
more information regarding what was wrong with your suggestions until now,
so assumed you were completely serious about them as they were ...

> Sorry for that, I still think that is not so easy
> for a newbie to understand povray development process and features by
> reading the faqs

Well, the reason for this is very, very simple:  The users POV-Ray are are
usually not programmers and thus the focus of FAQs is on the use and not the
development of the program...

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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