[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting minutes - August 4, 2013

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

Here's the notes from today's meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders

1) Planning for next release

- New release scheduling proposal has been accepted. This means we will do as follows:

a) Test build from svn trunk, after "BCon4" has been called.
b) An official Release Candidate from a 2.69 release branch 
  (including release number, splash, etc). 
c) The real release from this branch, after 1-2 weeks of testing and applying fixes.

If needed, a 2nd RC can be done from this branch as well.

We expect that by upgrading the RC to be a "real" release (has nice new splash!) the attention for trying and testing it will increase much compared previous RC builds.

- Release planning:

BCon2: Aug  11 (add branches to svn, targets are defined)
BCon3: Sept 01 (testing and fixing period)
BCon4: Sept 17 (provide test build, fixing only)
BCon5: Sept 29 (svn frozen, RC a few days after)

- Sergey Sharybin is working on planar tracker with Keir Mierle, expects it to be ready for upcoming release.

- Thomas Dinges' GSoC work will be ready for release too:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.69/Cycles

- Cycles: Stuart Broadfoot wants to remove the hair from the experimental feature set (move to official supported), update the interface for it.

- Question for Dalai Felinto: is Multiview going to be target?

2) Google Summer of Code

- Two projects didn't pass the midterm: Ines Almeida (Improved Debugging and Profiling) and Walid Shouman (Mesh data transfer).

- Antonis Ryakiotakis published a cool video of his progress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtZwYhHpdzg

3) Other projects and news:

- Thanks to Blender Development Fund contributions and donations, we can extend the Blender Foundation support team with Lukas Toenne, based on a 6 month agreement. Lukas will help doing his share of bug fixing and maintenance, especially for nodes and compositor. When time allows, he then can also pick up work on new particle system.

- Also Sergey Sharybin will be hired by the Dev Fund for support work after his GSoC period ends (sept 1st). Campbell, Brecht and myself will be sticking around as well - paid partially via BF, mostly via Blender Institute (e-shop) income.

- Meeting shortly discussed how to organize compositor feedback and use cases better. Jeroen Bakker will be available more during next period, or can work with Lukas to handle issue.

Thanks,

-Ton-

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