POV-Ray 3.7 out!

I've been using POV-Ray off and on for the past decade or so. I've never been extremely talented with graphical stuff, but I've always liked playing around with it; and POV-Ray, with its turing-complete scene description language, appeals to me as a programmer. I've used it when I needed to do some animation; for instance, I created the FOSDEM 2013 and DebConf13 "wait screen" animations for the video team with FOSDEM.

One particular downside of POV-Ray has always been the fact that their license was a custom non-free one. This was a historical accident (POV-Ray has existed for a long time, since before the popularization of FLOSS), and AIUI, the relicensing was impossible for various reasons. However, a rewrite of POV-Ray (as version 3.7) has been in the making for quite a while.

Today, I noticed two things: first, POV-Ray 3.7 was released (under the AGPLv3, thereby becoming Free Software); and second, as of the 3.7 release, the POV-Ray is put into a git repository and available on github.

Also, apart from it being free software now, POV-Ray 3.7 has a few new features as well. Most importantly among those (at least in my opinion), POV-Ray 3.7 is a multithreaded application, in contrast to POV-Ray 3.6 and before which wasn't.

Building it seemed to have some issues with the versions of a few things that are in Debian unstable; but for one of these a fix has already been merged, and for the other a merge request is out.

Now to decide whether I should package it...