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Thorsten Froehlich <tho### [at] trf de> wrote:
> KEBman wrote:
> > Yes, that's what I want. I think it's lame to blame it on malfunctioning PowerPC
> > emulator when you should have made the binary work on both PowerPC and Intel
> > Macs in the first place.
>
> You do realize that Apple shifted from one day to the other from PowerPC to
> x86 with no advance warning except for their largest software vendors, Adobe
> and Microsoft?
Apple announced that they would be switching to Intel in June 2005, and the
first Intel Macs were sold in January 2006. In a few weeks it will be 2010!
With or without the advance warning, there has been plenty of time for a
universal binary of POV-Ray.
> To ask a software released before that move to support
> something that was not known at the time is a joke, and a bad one!
We are not asking for an Intel version to have been released in 2005.
I do not intend to be critical of the POV-Ray team, here-- as others have
mentioned, this is free software, there are workarounds to this, and so on. But
the above response is invalid. As KEBman said, blaming an obscure PowerPC
emulation bug is lame. Likewise, blaming a years-old architecture switch is
lame. Here are some non-lame responses:
1. This will be fixed in our next major release.
2. Use MegaPOV or the command-line version instead. We not longer issue a
working Mac POV-Ray frontend program.
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Sterling Garwood wrote:
> "KEBman" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
>> Yes, that's what I want. I think it's lame to blame it on malfunctioning PowerPC
>> emulator when you should have made the binary work on both PowerPC and Intel
> etc .... <snip>
>
> I filed a bug report with Apple and they actually sent me the needed fixes in
> PovRay code ... its a PovRay issue -- who can get the source code fixed???
I know, I finally received them a few weeks ago, too. And to clarify, they
send you workarounds for the bugs in the PowerPC emulator, not for any bugs
in POV-Ray. The claim the responsible Apple engineer makes is this:
"The root cause of the problem is NOT a bug in Rosetta. The translator is
behaving exactly as it was designed. The problem is that the translator was
never intended to completely emulate a PowerPC processor. There are some
behaviors that simply can't be translated properly."
So their PowerPC emulator is no PowerPC emulator after all. His workaround
is actually inserting a few calls to the Carbon multithreading API that are
trapped by Rosetta and which allow the Rosetta PowerPC emulator to pick up a
thread state change. This call is not needed on a real PowerPC system, which
is in turn what POV-Ray was designed for. Hence, his excuse is rather funny
... and to shorten it he is saying "The Rosetta PowerPC emulator is not
designed to emulate a PowerPC processor."
Thorsten, POV-Team
PS: The issue of there being no POV-Ray update yet simply has to do with the
fact that I will only have time during my Christmas vacation for this.
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