On Tue, 21 May 2002 04:22:35 -0400, Felix Wiemann wrote:

> So it's not a bug that POV-Ray doesn't read povray.ini if there's
> .povrayrc in home directory, but it's IMO not the expected behavior. I
> think it might really be a better solution to read .povrayrc *and*
> povray.ini because otherwise the user probably would have to copy
> povray.ini. The configuration in povray.ini makes much more sense than
> (some of) POV-Ray's default values.

The general rule is that more specific files trump less specific files.
There's a system-wide default povray.ini, which can be overridden by a
user-level ~/.povrayrc.  All of this is very typical Unix behavior, though
system-level files are likely to be found in /etc rather than
/usr/local/lib/povray* and end in .conf rather than .ini.  Beyond that, a
more specific collection of default settings can be defined per directory,
which defines things at a project level, which is more specific than
either the user or system level.

Merging collections of settings rather than ignoring everything but the
most specific file isn't a bad idea, but it's a bit late for 3.5. Perhaps
the best thing to do is to copy povray.ini to ~/.povrayrc as specified in
the docs, edit as needed, and copy .povrayrc to foo/povray.ini when
starting a new project, explicitly specifying all settings at each level.

> BTW, README.unix (and maybe README, too) have to be UPDATED!
 
True, there are a bunch of 3.1 references still in there.

-Mark Gordon

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