[Bf-committers] Meeting minutes from last two meetings

[Michel Selten]

Hi,

here are the minutes from last two meetings.

1. Comments on the Blender 2.28 release
 - The release was good. A lot of positive reactions. Ofcourse some
   bugs were found.
 - The overall process seemed to be a little more chaotic that the
   process for 2.27. General feeling was that cvs should be closed
   for new feature additions at least for one week before a release.
 - The pre-release surely added to the quality of the Python API.
   For future versions, pre-releases should be made whenever a new
   big feature is added or when a part is rewritten.
 - Another idea was to do beta releases until no more bugs are
   found - just like a lot of other OpenSource projects do. No
   consensus on this idea was made however.

2. Blender 2.28a release
 - Bugs found so far:
   * A couple of Python related bugs - including some crashes
   * Volume envelopes don't work.
   * ctrl-RMB is reserved on Linux, which causes the edge select to
     not work. Ouch
   * A crash when selecting fonts on Windows.
   * A crash on 'reopen last'. This bug is noted as being critical.
     Blender 2.28a will not be released before this bug is fixed :)
 - General consensus was that a 2.28a release would be needed to fix
   those bugs. The 2.28a release will contain _only_ bug fixes - no
   new additions.
 - Because of the previous point, cvs commits are only allowed for
   fixing bugs. After 2.28a is released, new features can be
   committed again.
 - In the mean time, a lot of those bugs are fixed
 - OpenAL is not needed for the new audio sequencer. The build
   systems need to be updated to remove that dependency. This is
   already done for the regular Makefiles.
 - The shaders ported from Tuhopuu to the main tree by Ton are not
   entirely the same as pointed out by Cessen. For now, the shaders
   are functionaly, but not in the way as is in Tuhopuu. This is not
   a critical bug. Ton and Cessen should work together on this for
   2.29 to get this to a level where both are happy :)

3. Bug tracker
 - A start was made to go through some of the bugs - again. But it
   quickly resulted in a discussion on how to 'motivate' people to
   enter their contact address when we would need more information.
 - It's possible to only allow registered users to enter bug reports.
   This however may be a too high barrier.
 - Some more bold "PLEASE LOG IN!" or "Leave your name/email
   address!" lines could be added to the bug tracker pages.
 - Also, we should look at the tracker more often and try to fix the
   ones we think we can fix. If you have a comment to add to a bug,
   please add it!

4. Installing distributed files
 - With the addition of the international support in Blender, a new
   file was introduced to store users settings .Blanguages. By
   default, this file is not installed on the users system correctly
   unless the user chooses to use the Windows installer (and
   possibly also the installer on MacOS?).
 - Now, we could choose to 'fix' this the way the .Blend file is
   installed. That would mean that we have to 'fix' this everytime
   a new distributed file needs to be installed on the users system.
 - A nicer system for solving this problem is needed. Jacques Guignot
   offered to have a look into this, but he could use some help here.
 - Larstiq will write in the documentation what a user should do when
   installing blender.

5. Game engine
 - A lot of traffic has been generated on the mailing list about the
   game engine. A couple of persons are trying to integrate ODE into
   the engine - and apparently some successful experiments are done.
 - An idea was to have them have a seperate mailing list for the
   game engine discussion. A seperate mailing list for the Python
   team has certainly speed up development.
   We would rather wait with this mailing list until there are some
   patches provided and create the list when there's a greater need
   for it.
 - Since the game engine is a seperate part within the blender source
   tree, the updates to the code can be directly integrated into the
   main source tree - skip Tuhopuu.
 - Some documentation efforts for the game engine are in progress, it
   would be great if these efforts were put online somewhere to give
   others an overview of what's going on.

6. UI improvements
 - Madprof has created a patch that will give blender 'themability'.
   He included several colour schemes.
 - A feeling was that the patch would slow down the UI on OS-X. 
   However, as said by madprof, the patch should actually result in a
   slightly faster UI. Maybe, some other features were added that
   would slow down the drawing.
 - Also, the tab have been implemented in a seperate patch - which
   already made its way into Tuhopuu. There were mixed feelings about
   the usability of this patch.

Okie, that were the major topics of the last two meetings. See you all
next meeting - with Ton waving the hammer again.

With regards,
	Michel