[Bf-committers] Blender developers meeting minutes - February 27, 2016

Julian Eisel eiseljulian at gmail.com
Sat Feb 27 23:46:21 CET 2016


Spent some time thinking about this (wiki vs Sphinx) and after all I
agree with Brecht & Thomas as well.

On a first look, the instructions for building the manual might make
the appearance as if there was quite some work needed, but this really
isn't the case. It's mostly a matter of copy-pasting 3-6 commands
(including cd commands).
Don't remember how long the build time was, but I doubt it would take
anyone longer than ~30 mins to get everything set up.
Again I think it is much easier than it may seem. Maybe some video
tutorials could illustrate this a bit better.

Sphinx isn't no magic bullet, but I don't think wiki is either. And
regardless of the amount of individual contributors, I think the
manual is in a pretty good shape now :)

Just my two cents.

Cheers,
- Julian -

On 27 February 2016 at 23:35, Dan McGrath <danmcgrath.ca at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lets not forget the fact that the new manual ultimately is a bunch of plain
> html (well, not all, but static at least) files here, no php to crash,
> hack, upgrade blah blah. Speed-wise, it's hard to beat the performance for
> this type of setup.
>
> Dan
>
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 4:52 PM Thomas Dinges <blender at dingto.org> wrote:
>
>> I agree with Brecht here.
>>
>> The entry barrier is a bit technical, agreed. But following the steps on
>> how to set it up in the Manual, it was a 5 minute job.
>> After that it's not difficult anymore. Visually the new manual is much
>> better and well structured, I missed that in the old wiki.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Thomas
>>
>> Am 27.02.2016 um 22:48 schrieb Brecht Van Lommel:
>> > I'm a bit surprised that the manual is coming up as an issue now,
>> > there's been a lot of good work done there in the past few months.
>> >
>> > Even if it's just a few people doing most of the work, in my opinion
>> > that's just how most open source projects work. A small dedicated core
>> > and then smaller contributions from other. And I see commits from
>> > developers like Bastien, Thomas, Dalai, Gaia, Julian, Tamito and
>> > contributions from other people too. I don't think the wiki manual was
>> > more active?
>> >
>> > It would be good if the barrier could be lowered, maybe including
>> > sphinx python modules in the svn report, a Blender addon to help, I
>> > don't know. And certainly I would like all developers to document
>> > their work in the manual directly.
>> >
>> > But in my opinion the result is already much better than what we had
>> > in the wiki, without so much wrong information, broken links, warnings
>> > about reorganizations that never happen, etc.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:02 PM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 2:45 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>> So the actual issue is a lack of coordination work for contributors
>> and the
>> >>> reason why Manual is still in a reasonable shape is simply only
>> because all
>> >>> the contributors are scared away and now it's 1.5 people only working
>> on it.
>> >> The changes that have been made had some review first and corrections
>> >> made before being committed.
>> >>
>> >>> f we'll do better coordination work, then Wiki documentation will not
>> be a
>> >>> disaster at all.
>> >> Maybe so, on the other hand the wiki had a long time to prove its self,
>> >> and after many years never gave very usable documentation.
>> >>
>> >> I think we just don't have enough people interested and capable to
>> >> write (and more importantly maintain) documentation on *any* system.
>> >>
>> >> At this point though the new manual seems to be so unpopular that
>> >> (even though I personally find it nice to work with).
>> >>
>> >> This seems strange since for Blender we have 4gig of libs, or
>> >> install_deps scripts... boost,
>> >> yet for documentation installing a Python package is unacceptable or so.
>> >> Almost nobody (close to none of the developers) is really interested
>> >> to even bother installing Sphinx and trying to use it.
>> >>
>> >> Can we just give up and declare ourselves incapable of maintaining
>> >> documentation entirely?
>> >> Move back to the wiki? leave existing docs to bit-rot?
>> >>
>> >> If there is no support for the current system,
>> >> I'm not sure if we can expect anything to improve.
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