[Bf-committers] IRC meeting report sun march 23

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

Participants: Green, Larstiq, Zr, Hos, Shizu, dj2, sgefant, SirDude

1. Reducing complexity of Blender

This point caused some discussion and confusement. It shouldn't become  
a goal in itself, or better should be replaced with a discussion about  
what we want to accomplish. Also the lack of documentation is  
frustrating development even more.
Leaving out the game engine (web plugin, player) is still an option,  
but people expressed doubts what it actually would help.

2. Focus, what do we want to accomplish

Personal motivations are most important here, what do people actually  
prefer to work at. Topics people mentioned:
- make blender easier/better controllable etc with python. Implement  
external text file linkage and pull down menus to manage imported  
modules and scripts.
- OSX compiling with autotools and Project Builder
- provide easier import/export support, by documenting how to do this  
for new developers
- rendering support for 3Delight (renderman)
- improved rendering algorithms, cartoon shading
- improving character animation tools
- just adding "cool stuff", Blender as a candy machine :-)

Discussion on the 'documentation' topic, resulted in consensis to adopt  
the DocBoard standars for documentation. This means DocBook as a  
standard, with contributions as regular .txt or .html allowed, which  
then will be converted by people who understand DocBook (SirDude  
volunteered).
The CVS doc tree will be used for that.

-> Agreed was that people who contribute code ALSO should ad docs about  
it! Not only the changelog...

With the lack of a single vision on the mid-long term, we still have to  
work within the current situation; with a couple of individuals or  
small teams working at the topics/projects they like to.
In order to make this more visible and communicate the outside world, a  
"current coding projects" page will be made for the blender.org site.  
Each (sub)project will be mentioned, its goal and status, people who  
work on it, docs, and how they can be contacted. Ton will do that.

3. (Project)Leadership

Ton explained the efforts to get subsidy for appointing a fulltime  
development manager, to facilitate & coordinate the volunteers and  
their projects. Everyone agrees that this would be a good (maybe the  
only) way to get Blender efficiently developed in open source.
For the time being, using the new projects overview, the people  
mentioned there will be appointed project-leader, and get  
responsibility on organizing these parts in Blender as well.

4. State of development

The DNA system caused a discussion, especially for Hos who wants to  
change the internal 'Bones' structure quite some. This will cause a  
loss of compatibility and hence a patch in the do_versions() function.  
For this the actual version number in Blender has to be set at 2.27.
Agreed was to wait with this until the release is scheduled, and commit  
the patch (and increase the version number) during the release-testing  
week.

There was no time left to go over all development that was done the  
past month. This topic is moved to next week, with as first agenda  
point.

Next meeting: irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders, 16:00-18:00 CET,  
daylight saving time! Meaning for once the US timing is 09-11 EST,  
06-08 PST (maybe too early, sorry!). The US has daylight saving one  
week later...

-Ton-


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Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org