[Bf-committers] Meeting minutes, sunday 15th august, 2010

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

Summary of topics discussed on today's meeting:

1) Current projects

- Campbell's 'declarative UI' experiment has been discussed  
extensively now. Conclusion remains to stick to what we have, but stay  
open for (compliant) improvements that make the scripts more readable,  
with a visual structure more closer resembling the button layout  
itself. For this Campbell has code in svn now.

- Campbell also proposed to officially make UTF8 a standard for name  
strings in Blender (but not file paths). Some code needs to be checked  
for it still, especially to solve string length checking (amount of  
bytes can be larger than amount of glyphs). Meeting is in general OK  
with this.

2) 2.5

- RNA names (variable names) for UI and scripts will get a better  
consistency, as already been worked on by Campbell, Brecht and Luca.  
Campbell will make wednesday a final patch & proposal, friday it can  
be applied (after review).

- Meeting discusses briefly which GSoC projects can make it to svn  
now. For now, only the audio library project will be updated, since  
coder claims that this will fix most of the open bugs with audio.  
Other projects should still wait.

- Also branches will need to wait. There's no wide consensus to apply  
the Durian render branch either; which is acceptable, since the Durian  
project DVD will ship with this branch's binary, to allow full re- 
renders. Brecht is still available to help on merging later on.

- A next beta was originally scheduled end of august, that's soon...  
next week we should put this on agenda again.

- Meeting agrees on keeping focus on getting Blender stable. As Benoit  
stated "Blender is quite unstable today (I would even say dramatically  
unstable) and it should be the top priority." :)

- Ton announces that the sponsor (who paid for Matt) extended the  
sponsoring with sufficient funds to hire two part-timers on  
maintenance and bug-fixing. He's currently investigating the how and  
who. Within a week more news on this!


3) GSoC

- It's pencils down today! Obviously students can keep working on  
their branches, we even hope they will keep being involved! Also,  
since trunk is not available for mergers, we hope the students will  
stay around to do this later. (Which is a good reason to not add new  
stuff in trunk, then everyone can keep branches in sync).

- Students will get reviews from mentor team this week, which will be  
sent to Google. Note that good end-user and technical docs in wiki  
will do miracles!

Thanks,

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands