[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting minutes - February 27, 2016

Sat Feb 27 16:41:29 CET 2016

 > IMO the new Sphinx-based solution presents too much of an initial
> barrier to entry.

This may be true and first however, once the environment gets setup
It is really easy especially if you are using a GUI SVN client like Smart
SVN
In order to look at this correctly you need to see the arguments from both
sides.
These can be found on the new manual [1]. One of the reasons for the wiki
disaster
Is that too many people would edit which resulted in some bad content
and over redundant text.

1. https://www.blender.org/manual/about/migration.html

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 10:22 PM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I will strongly suggest to ignore Phabricators Wiki for the following
> > reasons:
> >
>
> It was mentioned as a possible alternative.
>
> > - It is not nearly as comprehensive as Mediawiki
> > - Editing policies in Phabricator are still quite limiting, meaning
> > granting someone's editing role for Wiki would either mean we manually
> > control this (which is same as current "Please mail us if you need Wiki
> > access" bullshit), or we'll effectively allow everyone to edit any object
> > in our tracker which is not acceptable.
> > - There's no comprehensive anti-spam tools in Phabricator.
> > - Search is kinda pathetic
> >
> > Only argument for the Phabricator's wiki i currently see is that you only
> > need one developer account to do the code and documentation. The truth
> is:
> > _any_ current developer has a Wiki account, yet it does not help keeping
> > documentation in an up-to- state. So the issue of out-of-date
> documentation
> > is clearly somewhere else. (and if it's really an account issue, we can
> > teach wiki.b.o to login with dev.b.o accounts).
> >
> > Let me ask this question: why would we keep diverging documentation from
> > one single place (which is wiki.b.o) to a multiple ones (currently it's
> > b.o/manual, and also proposed move of developer's documentation somewhere
> > else)? I don't see such a diverge making documentation any easier to find
> > or any easier to maintain.
> >
>
> We don't - and think using a wiki for developer docs is reasonable to
> stick with.
>
> > I do see however bullshit happening on current wiki.b.o, all this
> anti-spam
> > things which are done in really lazy way. But that only means our wiki
> > itself is to be changed. Truth here is, it's a _really_ old mediawiki
> > install which is just getting rotten. We can not upgrade it easily
> because
> > of the tree navigation, which required hacks all over the code. As for
> me,
> > we should evaluate such proposal instead:
> >
>
> The way we handle Wiki accounts is quite broken,
> for a while I was getting mails from `wiki at blender dot org`,
> and we got regular mails with people who wanted to just learn Blender,
> where I'm not even sure they knew what the wiki account was for.
> Sometimes their English was poor so it wasn't really clear why they
> wanted access.
>
> > - Re-consider navigation in Wiki, avoid having hacks to try support
> > navigation which was barely useful
> > - Prepare fully fresh install of Wiki (new engine, new web server
> settings
> > optimized for today's standards and so on)
> > - Install skin which we'll find acceptable (this is the most tedious
> work,
> > we'll need someone to work on the skin and it's not so simple for
> Mediawiki
> > i've heard)
> > - Migrate the content to a new Wiki
> > - Re-evaluate state of the documents in there, wipe out-of-date ones
> >
> > Benefits:
> >
> > - This keeps use of documentation the same as it always was
> > - This does not scare actual editors with wither fully offline editing
> > - Let's everyone (new developers, old develeoprs, non-developers) to have
> > project/design proposals in there, which are then simple to move to an
> > actual documentation/release notes
> > - Keeps release notes, release cycle, ongoing projects, personal
> > notes/design proposal/drafts in a single place.
> >
> > Simplified proposal: we can just ignore all history in existing Wiki and
> > simply start a new one. Even with a default skin it will not be less
> usable
> > than default sphinx/phabricator wikis.
> >
> > In any case, we would _have_ to update wiki sooner than later, and it
> will
> > bring it back to an usable state. Now, please stop for a moment from all
> > your "let's split stuff apart" proposal and outline _actual_ problems
> which
> > _can not_ be solved in a context of having fresh and working wiki.b.o,
> what
> > will be the benefits of that move and so on.
>
> +1 (and something we've discussed/agreed on informally).
>
> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:26 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Hi, here are the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net
> >> #blendercoders.
> >>
> >> 1) Upcoming release
> >>
> >> So far things go smooth with 2.77rc1, reminder that release notes need
> >> attention still.
> >>
> >> - Mike Erwin will do OpenGL release notes.
> >>
> >>
> >> 2) Current projects
> >>
> >> - Developers confirm that after 2.77 we should *stop* focusing
> >>   on 2.7x and move attention to bigger 2.8x projects.
> >>   However discussion shows we still need more concrete planning.
> >>
> >> - UI team will start having its own meetings,
> >>   current plan is to hold after next developer meeting.
> >>   Will be announced on the bf-committers mailing list.
> >>
> >> - UI project has _many_ open tasks with discussion and no conclusion,
> >>   these tasks could use some decisions from UI design leads.
> >>   (or archive if theirs no clear outcome and nobody has time for them).
> >>
> >>
> >> 3) Other Projects
> >>
> >> - Kevin Dietrich has begun work on the DwarfLabs Alembic patch,
> >>   plans to move development to a branch and update to support
> >>   import/export based on suggested changes in review.
> >>   https://developer.blender.org/D1783
> >>
> >> - @Blendify proposes to migrate developer documentation to new system
> >>   (and help with the migration),
> >>   https://developer.blender.org/T47563
> >>
> >>   However others in meeting prefer further discussion
> >>   on mailing list before going ahead and making changes
> >>   (evaluate Phabricator's Wiki for developer docs for eg).
> >>
> >> --
> >> - Campbell
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Bf-committers mailing list
> >> Bf-committers at blender.org
> >> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bf-committers mailing list
> > Bf-committers at blender.org
> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>
>
>
> --
> - Campbell
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