[Bf-committers] Reference counting, deleting data and fake users

Antony Riakiotakis kalast at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 19:20:09 CET 2012


Interesting ranting post on blenderartists about data lost due to user
not setting fake user on datablock.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?248813-MAJOR-BUG-in-2.62-loosing-Actions/page1

The point is, in my opinion: Should the user care about the number of
datablock references? This looks like something that would concern the
reference counting system of a memory manager/garbage collector rather
than users.

This would not have been a problem if we had an explicit way to delete
data and data always stayed in blender even after closing the program.
A user will usually want his data to stay if he creates it and go if
he deletes it. Currently there are two problems with the approach we
have: 1) You have to close the program to delete all unreferenced data
and 2) You can't create a library of datablocks without explicitly
setting a fake user, which is not the best of options.

I realize this might have been a popular theme of debate but I am not
up to the facts. Is this a design choice or simply not  implemented
yet? Is this part of the asset browser project?


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