I performed a local install of povray 3.7.0 beta 29 on Linux -- the freshest
beta tarball I saw available at http://www.povray.org/beta/ . After installing
to $HOME/usr/ , I attempted to render a scene and was greeted with the short
error message "povray: this pre-release version of POV-Ray for Unix has
expired".

After searching around, I discovered I needed to set the POVRAY_BETA environment
variable as explained in the previous thread:
http://news.povray.org/povray.beta-test/thread/%3C476af506$1@news.povray.org%3E/
The result of command 'povray --betacode' for me was 2021509749, which is what I
set $POVRAY_BETA to. When I render scenes now, the first line I see printed is
"povray: this pre-release version of POV-Ray for Unix expires in 2 day(s) and
23 hour(s)".

I had a few questions about the business with POVRAY_BETA, and am hoping someone
more knowledgeable on this list could shed some light:

1.) What is the point of enforcing this expiration date? Is the intent just to
force users to update their beta versions regularly?
2.) Why is the expiration time so short for a recently downloaded beta? Are
there plans to release a new beta sometime in the next three days?
3.) Is there an easy way to disable the expiration completely? I'd rather not
have to continually muck with the POVRAY_BETA variable. I experimented setting
my system clock
to three days in the future, and sure enough I was again greeted with the
"povray: this pre-release version of POV-Ray for Unix has expired" message, so
I'm anticipating problems with POVRAY_BETA after three days.

Thanks for any answers.

Josh

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