<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On 01/03/2007, at 11:12 AM, Stephen Swaney wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 09:40:38AM +1100, Matt Ebb wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">For an artist to download Blender and by default not be able to <SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">import or export anything would be an enormous turn-off and point of <SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">confusion. These days I think we should be doing as much as we can to <SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">encourage interoperability and make it easier for people to include <SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Blender in their pipelines. We shouldn't be making this harder.</DIV> </BLOCKQUOTE><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The burden of installing python is similar to the effort of installing</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">blender.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>If they can manage to find, download and install blender, they</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">should be able to manage python.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>For those who find google problematic</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">for finding things, we can provide a download link to <A href="http://www.python.org">www.python.org</A>.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>It's not that similar, and it's additional when we should be making things easier. People go to the Blender website to download Blender, because that's what they've heard about and that's what they want to use. And regardless of all the warnings and notices we put there, people won't read them. Artists will read messages like "to enable scripting you must download python", their eyes will glaze over and they will click on the nice icon to download Blender.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>And I think that's quite expectable. Most artists are not used to the Linux world of having to satisfy all sorts of dependencies just to get working in their app. Most artists don't have the faintest idea what libraries or scripting interpreters are and shouldn't need to. It's a very reasonable expectation of people that they should be able to download the application from the website, and it should just work.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Also, I'm not a Windows user myself so I don't know how this works, but it seems reasonable that forcing people to install Python can cause problems at businesses or schools where people don't have administrator access.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>In any case, regardless of whether some people may be capable of doing it or not, it is adding more steps and more burdens in the way of getting started with Blender, and this is a bad thing in and of itself, when we should be finding ways to remove burdens.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Right now, we provide windozers with a half-assed version of python - the</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">bare minimum needed to run our distributed scripts.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>Third-party scripts</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">may not run due to missing modules.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>If the artists start learning python</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">on their own, they may run into the missing module problem.<SPAN class="Apple-converted-space"> </SPAN>This seems</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">much more confusing than having to download and install something.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>There are far, far, more people using basic functionality such as import and export than there are writing their own scripts. Decisions on who to support and provide with ease of use should be weighted accordingly.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>And it's not more confusing to find missing modules. By the time that someone is at the stage of writing Python scripts in Blender that depend on modules outside of the Blender module and outside of the bundled ones, they're far higher up the learning curve and far better prepared to deal with issues like installing extra packages. I've been using Blender for 5 years, am a committer to CVS ferchrissakes and I've never needed to use an extra module other than 'math'.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Especially for people coming from other packages who want to evaluate Blender and get into it, import and export are some of the very first things that they will be doing. Hitting them with such a bump in the learning curve so early on is far worse in comparison. It's especially bad if it ends up with the importers will appearing in the menu but just not working, in which case it'll look like Blender is just crappy and doesn't work. I think these are the people we should be trying to encourage, not make life more difficult for them.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"> </BLOCKQUOTE>cheers,</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Matt</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Lucida Grande; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>------------------------------------------</DIV><DIV>Matt Ebb . matt@mke3.net . <A href="http://mke3.net0">http://mke3.net0</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN></SPAN></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>