[Bf-committers] Propose to reduce default feature set (*nix dev builds)

[Howard Trickey]

As one of the non-core developers, I'd just like to lend a supportive note
to this idea.
Who knows how many potential developers have been turned away because they
failed at the very first step and either didn't know where to turn for
help, or couldn't
be bothered because of the initial sour taste of not being able to build.

I started with the Windows development environment for Blender, and it all
went
smoothly.  I now use Linux (and some MacOS) for development. The first time
getting it to build on Linux was quite hard. Subsequent times have also
sometimes
been difficult, and it is only because I was more experienced in Blender
development
that I could tell what module had the problem and knew that there was an
easy way
to make progress - turn that module off, and if I really need that module,
come back
to figuring out the problem later.

As Campbell and Sergey said, my subsequent experience as a developer is that
a particular developer only needs a small part of Blender to work, and
there is not
much point including the rest of the modules while working. The only
problems that
are likely to show up would be caught by what should be a strong
recommendation
to 'make release' before committing code to the repository.

- Howard

On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Addressing this: >> I understand the reasoning behind it Sergey, but if new
> people want to build Blender they should get something which is approaching
> a feature complete build, otherwise what is the point of using a Dev build.
>
> Why would motion tracker developer want to deal with LLVM? Why new modifier
> guy would want to deal with Boost? Why compositor or dependency graph guys
> need to worry about any of external dependencies? This could be continued..
>
> For sure at some point developer would need to be able to compile
> feature-complete blender, but forcing him to solve all the dependencies
> from the very beginning is really scary for new developers.
>
> --
> With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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