[Bf-committers] Fix: Using Yafray for background rendering

[Alexander Ewering]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Wouter van Heyst wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 12:19:38PM +0200, Alexander Ewering wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Wouter van Heyst wrote:
>>
>>> Ton, do you agree reading the preferences makes sense while
>>> backgrounded? As far as I can see there are no dangerous side effects,
>>> but someone who knows the code better should comment.
>>
>> I'm not Ton, but I had similar worries when I saw the patch.
>>
>> I ran into the same problem with my renderdaemon support in instinctive.
>>
>> I needed the userprefs for supplying the common renderd NFS directory to
>> the daemons.
>>
>> Ultimately, I felt it was too unsafe to just call BIF_read_homefile from
>
> Was this a gut feeling, or did anything prompt you to that conclusion?

The general attitude that I have when modifying complex code prompted me to
that conclusion: Whenever I change something, I must expect that I break 10
other things, so I better don't change things :)

Life is easier that way!

In this special case, calling BIF_* functions from background often gave
segfaults to me (for example, BIF_read_file instead of BKE_read_file), that
was another reason.

>> background, and I just added a commandline option -D /path/to/renderd/
>> to supply it. Better anyway, this way every rendering machine can have
>> a different path to the renderd dir, and you don't have to store strange
>> ~/.B.blends on them.
>
> Adding a forest of commandline options doesn't look like the way to go,
> and we already have .B.blend to store information. Need to find a
> balance, but loading preferences seems good to me.

A forest? Did you look at things like man cdrecord or man convert? THAT'S
a forest :)

Well, what's the purpose of background rendering? Is there any other besides
doing distributed rendering? If no, I would consider it much more practical
to specify a simple commandline option instead of copying .B.blends around
my network.


| alexander ewering              instinctive mediaworks
| ae[@]instinctive[.]de   http://www[.]instinctive[.]de