POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Bug in Statistic_File name handling Server Time
1 Aug 2024 06:25:02 EDT (-0400)
  Bug in Statistic_File name handling (Message 1 to 1 of 1)  
From: Andy
Subject: Bug in Statistic_File name handling
Date: 3 Mar 2006 04:20:00
Message: <web.440809dbd1615fee43810da10@news.povray.org>
On IMP.org we had a convention of producing statistic files for each
animation frame called <frameno>.txt, e.g. 000.txt, 123.txt or 321.txt.
This worked fine with POV 3.5

IMP has has been quiet for a while and I've just discovered that this
doesn't work with POV 3.6.  Basically any filename *beginning* '0' gets
interpreted as 'false', any *beginning* '1' gets interpreted as 'true'.

So instead of the published behaviour:
Statistic_File=true  => Echo statistic text to STATS.OUT
Statistic_File=false => Turn off file output of statistics
Statistic_File=file  => Echo statistic text to file

What is actually happening in pov 3.6 is:
Statistic_File=1.*     => Echo statistic text to STATS.OUT
Statistic_File=0.*     => Turn off file output of statistics
Statistic_File=[^01].* => Echo statistic text to file
if you get my regex drift.
I appreciate that true/false can also be represented by on/off and 0/1,
but surely not 000.txt or 123.txt?

I've tested this using POV 3.6.1a on Windows XP, but also with an unofficial
3.6.1 vanilla commandline version compiled with MinGW.  For details see
http://www.imp.org/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=364 .

It wouldn't surprise me if this 'mis-implementation' of the
multi-purpose parameter was also present on other settings such as
Debug_File, Fatal_File, Render_File and Warning_File, although I
haven't tested them.

A small problem to be honest and easy to work round by prefixing the
name e.g. stats_123.txt.  I love POVRay really, but this has cost me
several hours of head-scratching as to why our stats reporting was now
working in such an irratic way, e.g. no stats for frames 000 to
199, then 200+ worked fine :~{


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