Am 05.05.2019 um 21:23 schrieb Hj. Malthaner:

> There is a branch called release/v3.8.0
> I've downloaded and compiled a version from it. Worked fine on the scene 
> file that kept crashing 3.7, and all the other files I used it with 
> since. Didn't find any problems yet.
> 
> I just wanted to ask, what is the official view on this version? 3.8.0 
> seems not to be released as something official anywhere.

The `release/v3.8.0` branch was the branch where preparation of the 
v3.8.0 release was happening, while changes slated for a later version 
was carried out in the master branch - until it was decided that v3.8.0 
still needed more work than expected, and that it would be too much work 
to maintain two branches for a prolonged time.

At that point, `release/v3.8.0` was merged into the master branch, and 
development of v3.8.0 is continuing there.


POV-Ray v3.8.0 has not been released *yet*, but (in contrast to v3.7.1) 
there is no intention to ditch it, and development continues.


As a POV-Ray developer, my personal(*) take on v3.8.0 vs. v3.7.0 is as 
follows:

In general, I would always recommend the latest tagged version of 
v3.8.0-alpha (see the "releases" section on GitHub; you can find not 
only Windows binaries there but also the corresponding source code) over 
v3.7.0.

We've fixed a lot of bugs, added various fancy features, and - probably 
most importantly in your case - we were able to eliminate most 
hard-coded limits

(*Chris Cason might chime in if the official POV-Ray dev team position 
deviates from my personal one.)


Admittedly, the v3.8.0-alpha versions do have some drawbacks:

- Occasionally a serious new bug might sneak into a tagged version; 
however, my gut feeling is that the community is pretty good at exposing 
such bugs quickly, and that we're good at following up with a fixed 
tagged version shortly thereafter.

- The v3.8.0 series is not "stable" yet, i.e. any new feature introduced 
since v3.7.0 may still be subject to change. (The probability for such 
changes vary between features.)

- The v3.8.0 series includes various changes under the hood that have 
not seen optimization yet, so it may be a little bit slower than v3.7.0. 
However, changes that significantly degraded performance were generally 
rejected, and other changes were made that by intention or happenstance 
improved performance elsewhere, so performance gains and losses can be 
expected to vary between scenes.

- There are no Windows installers for the v3.8.0-alpha series, and the 
Windows binaries are not digitally signed. Similarly, to my knowledge 
Linux distro maintainers do not provide v3.8.0 packages.


However, at least for Unix users who choose to build POV-Ray from source 
code anyway, I think the improvements significantly outweigh the drawbacks.

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