I decided that prior to releasing the windows source I would do more work
on the migration settings, rather than release more or less what beta 25
had. As a recap, betas up to beta 24 read their settings from pvengine.ini,
as per previous versions, and additionally shared the same pvengine.ini as
the installed version of POVWIN 3.6. (The editor does not use pvengine.ini;
it uses the registry, but also shared the 3.6 editor's settings).

Beta 25 made no change to the editor settings but moved the settings that
used to be in pvengine.ini into the registry, but still was under the 3.6
registry branch.

Additionally, betas 25 and lower used the same window class name as 3.6
(this is relevant in that it is used to identify if another copy of POVWIN
is running).

The new code (labeled beta 25a mainly to differentiate it from earlier
versions - it is not a formal release at this point) has the following
changes to the above:

  1. The registry location for both the editor and pvengine has been moved
     to a 3.7-specific branch. [For those wanting to poke around with
     regedit, check out HKCU\software\POV-Ray\v3.7].

  2. The window class handle has been changed to a 3.7-specific value.
     This means that 25a will no longer count pre-25a betas or v3.6 as
     being a 'running instance'. This really only matters if you have the
     'keep single instance' option set, and/or you are passing parameters
     to an already-running instance of POVWIN.

  3. Migration code has been added that will attempt to clone the version
     3.6 settings as much as possible. For pvengine settings for which it
     makes sense (e.g. the secondary render INI file), if the old path
     refers to a location within the old home dir, and the same file/dir
     exists in the new home dir, the path will be changed to suit. Other
     paths (open edit files, last rendered file, etc) are copied but
     otherwise left alone.

  4. The code now expects a help file named povwin37.chm (which doesn't
     yet exist, unless you want to do a copy/rename of the old one).

Additionally, I have updated to the latest version of the boost libraries
(this will make it much easier for folks to build the source since POVWIN
previously used a slightly customized version).

Note that one possible downside to the above boost change is that I can
no longer set the stack size on a per-thread basis. This can make a
difference to render threads since of course POV-Ray can be heavily
recursive. To compensate I have set a new default stack size and changed
some other threads (e.g. the editor syntax threads) to manually request a
smaller stack. However, it needs testing to ensure that the new stack size
is sufficient

Prior to releasing the source for testing I'd appreciate a sanity check of
the new code. If anyone wants to check it, it's available (for a short
time) via http://www.povray.org/temp/povwin-beta25a-test.zip.

If you want to put it into your 3.6 install dir, make a new subdirectory
(e.g. called POV-Ray for Windows v3.6\bin37) and put the exe and DLL's
there. [The location does matter since the code that infers the home dir
for installing the new registry settings looks at the path and if it
doesn't find some of the standard dirs present it will complain].

If you want to create a new 3.7 structure (recommended), you should at the
least clone the include, renderer, insert menu, sounds, and tiles dirs.

As per version 3.6, if you wish to make the inferred home path setting
permanent, you can run pvengine with the /INSTALL switch.

Please let me know of any issues. Source will be released on Sunday barring
any major problems.

-- Chris

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