William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> On 1/3/21 9:17 AM, Mr wrote:
> > William F Pokorny <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> ...
> >>
> >> Indeed, the vim support for POV-Ray (3.7) comes by default on most all
> >> unix based systems because it comes with vim itself. POV-Ray (3.7) via
> >> Debian support is there on a good many linux variants too. I installed
> >> v3.7 on my raspberry pi 4 via a usual package install.
> >>
> ...
> >
> > There was a time when POV was shipped with Ubuntu... It would be a good target
> > to try re-establishing that flag, and having integration in such corner stones
> > as VIM, Blender, are a big step in that direction (VIM ships with very selective
> > Lubuntu out of the box!). Slightly off-topic: I don't know why POV was removed
> > from UBUNTU, nor if any other mainstream distro still offers pov package, but
> > now that the relicensing to AGPL has been achieved, maybe there is hope for such
> > a return?
> >
>
> Hmm... I don't think your view of the current POV-Ray availability is
> accurate.
>
> For a long time (Ubuntu 14?) POV-Ray v3.7 has been a package available
> for install from Ubuntu and any other Debian based linux distribution.
> It's certainly still available from Ubuntu 20.04 to which I moved last
> fall.
>
> On my Ubuntu 20.04 upgrade I looked in some detail at the very nice job
> of repackaging the POV-Ray components the Debian support people had
> done. These updates were picked up for Ubuntu 20.04. There is a post in
> povray.unix about this if you're interested.
>
> For v3.8, Dick Balaska provided the only Debian POV-Ray packages of
> which I'm aware - qtpovray 3.8. A native v3.8 POV-Ray Debian package is
> not available for install - as far as I know.
>
> Bill P.

Thank you for partly clarifying. I was indeed only aware of the main idea (Only
stable official pov, "only" available in package repositories). When I said
"shipped", I meant "out of the box", as available without launching any synaptic
or package manager whatsoever, just like Vim is for Lubuntu or  Python is
included out of the box for the one time user to fire at will in almost any
Linux distribution. Now maybe that was never actually the case for POV? (I
believed, maybe misconceived, it once was). My question now is why? And could it
ever?

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