[Bf-committers] New project, let's move on!

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi everyone,

The amount of time involved in getting Blender autoconfed is disturbing. 
Although I'm happy with the efforts people put in it, there's no clear 
outlook when it will be finished. I've had discussions with Kent Mein 
and Hans Lambermont on this topic yesterday, and they agree on the 
following:

- continue with autoconf as a secondary project, to be completed 
somewhere in Q1 2003.

- fix the current makefiles/project files system in the very short term, 
to get ready for actual Blender development.

Most important reasons for this are:

- Autoconf is a very complex system to implement, and only a few people 
can do that work.
- Autoconf experts for other platforms than Linux are hard to find
- The old NaN Makefile system provides functionality that still 
outperforms what we think is possible with autoconf in the short term
- Both systems can easily live together without conflicts.

It's becoming a waste of time for all potential Blender developers out 
there to wait for autoconf. Kent Mein also hinted this in his status 
report a few days ago.

For decisions on autoconf (how to implement it) I've pointed to Mesa3d, 
an excellent example of a cross platform project. Please check this out, 
  copy from it what needed, and don't hesitate to contact the project 
moderators; they know Blender, and might be eager to help.

Efforts to get the current makefiles/project files working should be as 
limited and simple as possible; just getting the current code compiled 
and having a Blender running with it. Even when that's without player or 
plugin. Associated with this work is some docs on how to do it, and 
which OS/tool versions (releases) are required minimum for it. The 
document as already committed by Micheal Selten 
(docs/building_blender.html) is an excellent start for it.

I would like to appoint a few 'moderators' for this stage, for each OS 
(or Blender version). The moderator will be able to provide guidlines, 
and can accept/reject code submissions from others.

MacOSX: Stefan Gartner (sgefant)
Sun Solaris: Kent Mein (sirdude)
Linux: Frederick Lee (phaethon)
IRIX: John Walton (JWalton)
FreeBSD: Hans Lambermont
Windows: Maarten Gribnau (or Simon Clitherow, aphex, please let me know)

The people above: please let me know if you can agree with it. And if 
so, communicate about what has to be done, when it will be done, and who 
will do it!

Can we target this before Christmas? I just *love* Christmas deadlines! :-)

Thanks,

-Ton-

(BTW: at projects.blender.org the first version of sourceforge is 
running. There seems to be a problem with the database, so it doesn't 
work yet. The volunteers now are looking at installing gforge instead, a 
very promising SF fork: http://gforge.org. They've got a Christmas 
deadline too)


_____________________________________________________
Ton Roosendaal | ton@blender.org | Blender Foundation
Amsterdam | The Netherlands |  http://www.blender.org