[Bf-committers] Lack of coordination and communication in Blender development

joe joeedh at gmail.com
Sun Aug 16 00:24:44 CEST 2015


On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 12:49 PM, Kai Kostack <kaikostack at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hello Martijn, hello Antony,
>
> I'd like to emphasize that I have great respect for every person involved with Blender development. I'm following the mailing lists more or less since 2004 and I remember often core redesign took place only within a small group of people and not so much in public.

This isn't always a bad thing, though. As developers, it's our job to
do what the wider Blender community *needs*, and sometimes that
conflicts with what it *wants*.  The mesh refactor and the debate over
ngons was a perfect case of this: a lot of people were disturbed by
the idea of supporting ngons in Blender.  This never bothered me, nor
did it bother other senior developers. We knew the users would come
around in the end, so we simply went ahead and did it anyway.

I do agree that Blender needs a better way to coordinate tasks between
developers, but I don't think a big open process is the answer.
That's what nearly killed Gimp.  Part of this is Blender's lack of
modularization compared to other 3D software, which is what the
current redesign effort is aimed at.  A more modular/graph-based
design will make it a lot easier to implement features without
stepping on other people's toes.

>
> Scorpion81 and me will take care of a list of the requirements. We don't even expect guarantees, we only would like to make sure our interests are not overlooked this time and at least being considered.

This tends to be a time constraint problem more than anything else.
The best thing to do is to keep reminding people you exist, so they'll
keep you in mind.

>
> Above that I really think the interaction between core devs, hobby devs and users could use improvement in this regard.
>
> Thank you so far.
>

Best,
Joe


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