[Bf-committers] Remove Frameserver

[Campbell Barton]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Carsten Wartmann <cw at blenderbuch.de> wrote:
> Am 03.08.2012 00:19, schrieb Thomas Dinges:
>> Hey everyone,
>> Today Campbell, Sergey and I discussed to drop frameserver.
>>
>> The reasoning is, that it's not really used (at all?).
>
> I always was aware of this, tried it some times. Always wanted to use it
> someday. However all projects I did so far using Blender from
> commandline to deliver images from a server (imagine the user
> customnizes a product and gets it back as rendered image preview) used
> to call Blender via command line and processes the returned by PHP...
>
> BTW: I just tried Frameserver and it still works.
>
>> Any objections to that?
>
> Is it really helpfull to remove? I would not remove it until it gives a
> real advantage or the size of Blender would shrink a resonable amount. I
> still think it can be usefull ;-)
>
> BTW2: It would be nice to return PNG or JPEG or whatever Blender offers
> ;-) PPM is just too old.
>
> Best regards,
> Carsten

Its helpful to remove because we shouldn't give users options that are
not useful/tested/ready-for-production...

When you use software and get the impression that some parts are not
maintained - they crash or just fail, it doesn’t inspire confidence
you want when relying on software for important projects.

I had a look over the frameserver docs:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Source/Render/Frameserver

... but I'm still not convinced this is really worth keeping - its 8
bit channels. no alpha, no compression, that it can be setup to work
with scripts over a network is clever but not generally useful IMHO.

This could be put in a similar category as "Compiling blender as a
python module" - its nifty and maybe very useful in some cases, but
I'd prefer to disable for regular builds (if not remove).