Difference between revisions of "Documentation:Unix Section 7"

Revision as of 16:55, 14 December 2010

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Bug Reports

Before submitting any bug reports, make sure that the bug is not in the list of known bugs below. Please remember that the POV-Ray users who provide assistance on our news server are volunteers who give their time for free so you can enjoy this program for no charge. Keep this in mind when wording your message.

MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE that the subject of your report isn't already covered in this document. Questions that are already answered either in this help file, any README's, installation notes, FAQ's, or other files supplied with this program will most likely not get the reply you expect.

We strongly recommend that you check out the online version of the POV-Ray Questions and Tips before submitting a report.

Feature Requests are not bugs

The above may seem to be an obvious statement, but it's not so obvious that this section is unnecessary. Numerous people had been sending feature requests to the bug reporting email address, and this is in part one of the reasons why we no longer provide email support. If you want to request a feature, discuss it in one of the povray groups on our private news server.

Known Bugs

This release version 3.7 has two known problems:

Due to problems with X11 some special command line parameters are not available. However, a preview display can still be enabled if building from source and the optional SDL library is available to link against.
Writing JPEG output files (+fj) causes an error at the end of the render on some 32-bit systems, due to differences in structure alignment between the libjpeg shipped with the OS distribution and the POV-Ray binary.

Spelling

As stated in the introduction, we use international English spelling in many parts of POV-Ray for Unix. This means that many words that are normally spelt with a 'z' in American English (such as minimized) are spelt with the English 's' (e.g. minimised). We have actually received flame email from folks who told us we couldn't spell.

Bug Reporting via Email

Unfortunately, email bug reporting is no longer available due to the abuse of this facility by a number of users. You may only report bugs in POV-Ray by using the bugtracker mentioned in the next section.

Bug Reporting via our Bug Tracking System

Bug reports may be lodged about povray by using the bug tracking system. The bugtracker is monitored regularly by the POV-Ray development team and they will address any properly-lodged bug reports in the most timely manner possible.

You may like to remember, however, that no matter where you end up getting assistance from, users who show that they have looked in the documentation and read the POV-Ray Questions and Tips first, will be much more likely to receive the response they want than someone who obviously has not done their homework. It's also important to check that the bug hasn't already been reported - if it has, and is still open, don't add a new report - if you have relevant information not already in the existing report, consider adding a comment.

Any messages or reports sent to us may (not necessarily will, but may) be re-posted in our newsgroups, on USENET, or on our web site, if we consider it appropriate to do so.

You should not expect any reply to bug reports. If you wish to follow the progress of a bug, it's best to use the bug tracker (be sure to configure your account to receive notifications of replies to your bug). You can also request to be emailed when there are replies to an existing bug report.

The minimum information to include in your bug report is:

The version number of POV-Ray for Unix.
Your operating system or GNU/Linux distribution and version. It's surprising how many people fail to provide this basic piece of information. We need to know what version of Unix you are running.
Your computer; what processor and how much memory.
A complete description of the problem and what led up to it. It will make it a lot easier to track down if you can include a scene file that will cause the problem. If the file is large, try removing parts until you have the minimum scene file that will cause the problem.

Note: If posting on the news group or emailing someone for support, do not include file attachments without asking first. This particularly applies to email (for security purposes, emails with unsolicited attachments may be deleted unread). Reasonably-sized file attachments on the bug tracking system are permitted.

Benchmark Rendering Mode

Speed Considerations