The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (POV-Ray).
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Attached to Project: POV-Ray
Opened by Christoph Lipka - 2010-11-28
Last edited by Thorsten Fröhlich - 2011-08-23
Opened by Christoph Lipka - 2010-11-28
Last edited by Thorsten Fröhlich - 2011-08-23
FS#173 - Prevent POV-Ray for Windows from stealing focus
In some cases it may be desirable to run POV-Ray from a batch file, without causing it to “steal the focus”.
I suggest making this dependant on whether POV-Ray is run with the /EXIT parameter.
Just for comparison, on linux (ubuntu, gnome), I avoid that behaviour with Compiz by changing in
System/Preferences/CompizConfig Settings Manager the value in General Options, tab "Focus & Raise Behaviour", field
"Focus Prevention Windows":
from: !(class=Polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1)
to: (!(class=Polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1)) | class=povray
It is otherwise very painful to work while rendering animations or the allscenes.sh script.
Note that the "stealing" of focus is by design to prevent POV-Ray from being used by some application in the background. Hence making this a feature that can be disabled would defeat its purpose.
We're going for a GPL-based license model, right? In that case, unless I'm misunderstanding something, the designed purpose will already be defeated by the license change anyway, so there remains no point in keeping that focus-stealing.
No, the license allows us to require to show the AGPL 3 copyright and authors of the program as part of clause 7 b) and c) as supplement terms.
Looks like I misunderstood something indeed (or rather missed something until now; I had already wondered how to legally keep up the requirement for inofficial versions to set POV_RAY_IS_OFFICIAL=0).
However, I'd still prefer less intrusive ways of making sure the user knows that they're using a piece of free software called POV-Ray. For instance, focus might be given back after the splash screen has been shown, or something along those lines. Anything that prevents a user from accidently typing stuff in the pov editor just because they had been typing something just the very moment their batch script started POV-Ray for another run.
I'm also wondering why this feature is in the Windows version but not in the Unix one. (Well, actually I'm not really wondering - just pointing out that this is somewhat inconsistent.)
If someone wants to make an unofficial version with this feature, or (more probable) to make a console version for windows, this would be possible. At this point I'm not going to concentrate on putting it into the windows version, though.
Note that it is always possible to run the windows version and then invoke subsequent renders from the command-line; if 'keep single instance' is set, the transient version will pass the render command to the running version and then exit without showing a splash screen. This doesn't quite do the same thing as running a series of renders from a batch file as it doesn't signal when the render is complete, but with use of post scene shellout commands this could be worked around.