On Thu, 10 Aug 2006 18:39:02 +0200, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> It is not just Linux, it is the other Unix variants as well. Remember that
> while there is a binary distributed for Linux, the same source code is
> portable across most Unix variants. If you Google for it, you will quickly
> find that there is no universally common way of detecting this in such a
> case. Sad but true.

It's easy to forget that from a POV-Ray development standpoint (at least
for me as someone who has built it on Linux but not spent a lot of time
looking at the code) that the same codebase is used for all *nix
platforms.  If I had a vote, I'd say that leaving it like that would be
best, because it makes maintenance easier.  

The company I work for does cross-platform development and while I'm not
one of the developers, I know that at least some of the code in question
is maintained differently for different versions of Unix and Linux (for
example, using different memory management libraries on different versions
of Unix, even) and that does increase testing complexity.  While the
product in question does leverage the functinalities on different
platforms for specific reasons, I don't see that it's really necessary for
POV-Ray to do so (there'd have to be a strong use case, IMHO, to offset
the extra development and testing needs).

Of course, those of you who do the development are in a much better than
me to appreciate the maintenance issues, but I just wanted to say that
this makes sense to me. :-)

Thanks for that information.

Jim

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