[Bf-committers] Meeting minutes sunday january 4 2004

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi!

irc.freenode.net, #blendercoders,

1. Scons
Michel reported on the proceedings of using Scons as replacement for  
autoconf (and maybe even Makefiles!) as method to build Blender. So far  
the the results remain encouraging, although not all platform related  
topics and desired options are implemented yet.
The Scons files will get committed now. Michel will coordinate the  
efforts with the active maintainers for this system. Michel also will  
take care of good dummy level documentation for Scons. :)

2. Documentation
We discussed briefly the proposal to adopt Doxy for documentation of  
source codes. This topic didn't get real endorsement though... the need  
for good code documentation is still evident though. What I think most  
people agree on is:
- comments should help someone (else) work with the code
- but when someone doesn't have the competence and background to actual  
work with this code, it is not useful to add comments for it
- comments in code don't need to comply an external tool, such as  
Doxygen

A discussion went on what acceptable minimum level is... like  
explaining a 'dot product', or the 'triangle sine law'. The latter  
caused an interesting discussion, not because people don't know the  
math, but were confused which of of the triangle rules actually was  
meant with it.

Apart from actual code-comments, the need for documentation is about  
much more general topics... like reveiling the secrets how displists  
are used, armatures get evaluated, editmesh flags work, etc.
Suggested is to start a 'need for documentation' list, based on what  
the current active developers need, to do their work better.  
Unfortunately there are not many candidates for such jobs, and mostly  
it will end up at my desk... Not to mention that documenting will  
typically end up with re-discovering this code needs urgent cleanup! :)

Another related topic, is that 'owning' certain parts of code, also  
involves being responsible for providing readable docs about how such  
code works, or is intended to work. Such docs can just be delivered in  
plain text or html.

3. Regular builds
Matt proposed to organize providing regular binaries for users. He'll  
add a new forum for it at blender.org, and we'll support that on  
voluntary basis now. Everyone was positive about the idea.
If developers here cannot host such binaries themselves, hint me to  
copy it to the blender downloads site.

4. Blender 2.32 shortlist & release
It is time again to work towards a release. As agreed on with past  
release, we now provide testing versions in advance, at least 1 week  
before actual release is scheduled. For this Matt's forum is excellent  
means. On our shortlist for 2.32, what's still in development, is:

- new rendering options (ton will make full html doc for users)
- beveling tool Mesh (might need optim, I'll check)
- new loopcut... goofster will check on this first
- displacement mapping, ton will help DetThorn with some integration  
topics
- menus with python for import/export. Matt will help reviewing proper  
locations in UI
- Python script-space (in progress)

Target for release in 2 or 3 weeks. Next week we can verify the status  
of above list.

-Ton-


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--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton@blender.org  
http://www.blender.org