[Bf-committers] Patch #6161 updated

[Early Ehlinger]

I finally had some time to re-synch the ResPower blender tracing patch with
the latest SVN.  This is the patch that ResPower uses to provide progress
information in its render logs, since viewing render nodes' desktops is
expensive compared to sending a few lines of text to a customer's web
browser.

The way it works is that it exposes a new python API whereby a script can
request that Blender send trace messages to a python function.  On the
ResPower farm, the python function simply prints the output to the console,
and the farm management software reads the console and saves the output to
the log.

The instrumentation here is mainly rendering-centric, but the patch can be
extended to support other portions of the code as well.  This would be
useful, for example, to have end-users generate a log file to track down
difficult-to-reproduce bugs.  (e.g., "run this script, email me the log file
when the bug occurs!" )

I would really like to get this patch into the trunk so that we can start to
provide support for the official releases of Blender more quickly (download
and deploy, as opposed to download, patch, build, and deploy), and also so
we can add support for the svn version of Blender for our more advanced
users.  We can't do this now as patching the files every day would be a
major hassle.

The default behavior should be indisginquishable from not having the patch,
i.e., you should only notice a difference if you turn on the functionality
from python.  See /source/tools/test-blender-trace.py for an example of
using it.

-- Early Ehlinger, President, ResPower, Inc.
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