Am 11.02.2017 um 15:49 schrieb Jan Lind�ker:

> There exist no configure-file to build povray on unix when dowloading from git

That is a true observation ;)


POV-Ray has virtually always been a multi-platform application, and we
as developers try to continue the tradition of being as impartial as
possible when it comes to target platforms.

Among other things, this expresses in a refusal to bow to any
platform-specific conventions in the organization of the source code in
our repository. Most notably, we follow the convention that _any_
platform-specific code must reside in dedicated platform-specific
directories, to avoid platform-specific files encroaching upon each other.

This is one reason why there is not, and never will be, a script named
`configure` in the main directory of our GitHub repository. Having such
a script in that particular place is a strictly Unixoid convention, and
we will not relax our policy of platform segregation for this.


The other reason is that we don't even /maintain/ such a `configure`
script: Rather, we maintain a precursor to the script, `configure.ac`,
from which the actual script is generated using the autoconf tools. The
script itself therefore does not qualify as a source file, and thus has
no place in the repository.


It is possible to /convert/ the contents of the repository into a
package that follows Unixoid conventions, using the following commands:

    cd unix
    ./prebuild.sh
    cd ..

Before the release of 3.7.0, when the source code was still maintained
in a private repository, we used to provide platform-specific
distribution packages where this step had already been performed, but we
have ceased to do so with the move to GitHub. The rationale behind this
was that if we continued to provide pre-processed Unix-specific source
packages as an alternative, a noticeable portion of users would download
the source code directly from the repository anyway, so we shifted our
time and energy towards trying to inform our users about how to perform
this simple step themselves.

Looks like we're not fully there yet.


> In povray 3.7.0.RC6 there was a configure file in the root directory. 3.7.0.RC6
> was extracted from povray-3.7.0.RC6.tar.gz however.
> $ cd .../povray-3.7.0.RC6
> $ find . -name configure
> .../configure

That must have been one of the last official Unix-specific distribution
packages then.

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