On 1/24/22 07:36, jr wrote:
> no, thank you.  I was sure I'd grep'd the documentation, evidently not.  </sigh>
> 

As you know the povr documentation is kinda hit or miss a present - 
partly because I don't want to document while still settling on 
approaches only to need to do the work again.

The new functions as documented in functions.inc are decent, but 
otherwise....

Grepping now I see amplify mentioned some in revisions_povr.txt and 
pretty sure I added notes about it in a posting or two as well.

> which brings me to the next problem, how to write a scene so both 'povr' and the
> various POV-Rays are happy?  I had hoped that the version could be used, given
> the "unofficial" declaration[*], but cannot see a difference.  asking because I
> use a mixture of (shell) aliases + functions and scripts like 'povr' (all
> different executables) for the scenes, and ideally the emission/amplify thing
> and such would be conditional.  do I have to use self-declared constants?
> 
> [*] that too is confusing.  the docs say 'version' is a float, yet in your
> scenes you use "#version unofficial 3.8;".  where is stuff like that documented?
>   not here:
> <https://wiki.povray.org/content/Reference:Numeric_Expressions#Built-in_Variables>
> 

Yeah, it's unfortunately a bit of mess since v3.7. One which clipka 
tried variously to somewhat address.

Writing from memory from earlier last year or late 2020... The 
versioning stuff is something in an awkward state and I have no idea how 
to really fix it.

Ignoring that there was a more complex versioning proposal part of 
uberpov, it was supposed to be we could write something like:

#version unofficial povr 3.8;

where the 'unofficial' keyword would STOP folks running a scene targeted 
for some particular unofficial release in an official release of POV-Ray.

I have no idea why unofficial is not itself documented. It's been there 
a long time. Maybe because there was a worry folks would add it to 
regular POV-Ray scenes or something... I think it should be documented.

My 'assumption' is official window's releases do stop cold on seeing 
'unofficial', but I don't run windows - so I don't know.

The non-windows stuff is compiled by other people whether individuals or 
by package providers. Those releases are ALL unofficial though probably 
today the majority in use. In such releases you only get warnings where 
an unofficial keyword is used. Stopping cold would probably be better 
for at least the distribution provided packages.

The 'povr' or whatever token was supposed to be a hook upon which 
conditional stuff could be done in the SDL. You can still see this form 
of versioning if you look say at:

http://megapov.inetart.net/samples.html

Unfortunately, and guessing some, it seems we at some point (v3.7 ?) 
broke the ability to indicate the branch token and this state of affairs 
exists in many recent official releases of POV-Ray proper...

So, where you see me using only:

#version unofficial 3.8; // povr

in example povr scenes I post or ship, it's because creating a warning 
about the SDL using 'unofficial' is all I can reliably do to warn people 
it's unofficial SDL code for povr.

> 
>> No news on the -win id thing. The end of the year was both busy and
>> bumpy health wise for me. Truth is I'm mostly only now getting back to
>> last work left hanging last October.:-)
> glad you're "back in the groove".  (I get the feeling that option is not much of
> a priority.  :-))

Eh, I don't know. Pretty much all of the pfm rtr frame snap shot 
capability and actual cycle control was done with a -win capability in 
mind. The work just got dropped along with everything else.

Unfortunately it's really painful once you are out of the coding 
"groove" to get back in it. What was I thinking months back? Where did I 
put those files? Oh yeah! They're in that jr_causing_trouble directory. 
:-)

Bill P.

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