[ODE] some quick notes on 0.6...

[Rodrigo Hernandez]

John Miles wrote:

>I'm just being a user advocate, really.  I don't have an application for the
>convex primitive, so it's not a problem for me one way or the other.  I'm
>simply suggesting that a primitive that limited has no business in the main
>distribution.  It makes for an incredibly-poor "out of the box experience",
>no pun intended, when someone downloads ODE and runs test-boxstack for the
>first time.  Few will bother to dig through list archives and manuals after
>an experience like that.
>
>  
>
Although its true that the primitive is work in progress, ODE is still 
on a beta stage, hell, its not even suposed to be part of a Linux
distribution, if we were to make 0.6 a completelly stable full-feature 
library, we would still be trying to get it out of the door.

>Complaining about the lack of callback functions (wow, way to slow down
>terrain collisions by 500%) and Y-up/Z-up limitations (wow, a major
>inconvenience for at least 0.05% of the users) in an otherwise rock-solid
>primitive, while accepting a convex collider that while academically
>interesting isn't usable for *any* practical purpose, falls into the "wow,
>just wow" category.
>
>  
>
I already gave the reasons for this, the convex primitive code is writen 
directly into the core, it is not a patch or apendage the way OPCODE is, 
it was never "accepted" or "promoted", it was built into the core.
This is an Open Source, free library, developers work in what they need 
the library to do for themselves, some will donate their code, some dont,
the reason why the terrain primitive is not part of the main library is 
because no one has steped up and taken the task to make it so.

>Please don't take all this ranting personally: it's strictly an advocacy
>exercise.  ODE 0.6 still works great for my own application, and there have
>been some very real improvements that are much appreciated.  But the
>maintainers need to decide whether they're building a highly-experimental
>R&D project or a practical (if limited) tool.  Nothing wrong with either,
>but you can't do both.
>  
>
I am sorry, its hard not to take it personally, you came and made a 
misinformed attack to my code, without any constructive comment, so you 
will forgive me if I do so.