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

[Campbell Barton]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 10:27 AM, Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx at gmail.com> wrote:
> As for instructions -- it's somewhat depends. Sometimes instructions work,
> sometimes they don't We still have users who followed those instructions
> and had issues getting manual fully built. Surely it's something caused by
> a particular setup on that machine, but it is just wrong claiming that
> everything works just fine and leaving contributors all alone with those
> issues.
>

Is this happening often? is this on IRC... mailing list?

>
> Julien, i recon it bullshit to wait 30min for the manual to be compiled
> when you only need to fix single typo. Surely you can commit stuff directly
> without local check, but that's only asking for even bigger problems.

Full build here takes 1min, 32seconds (on system from 2009).
Further partial rebuilds are a few seconds.

And if your *really* only fixing typos, you can just commit too.

> Brecht, Thomas, the quality of those docs are not increased by Sphinx
> itself, it's just because people invested fewzillion effort to re-do manual
> from scratch. Same could have been easily done with existing Wiki manual.

Manual is definitely not redone from scratch.

> Dan, i bet we can configure new wiki in the way it works reliable and fast
> enough.
>
> If we have strong coordination work happening around documentation, i do
> not see any reason to commit to any global changes and diverge things and
> raise the entry barrier any further. That coordination could easily happen
> inside of wiki (assuming it gets re-installed and updated to all latest
> versions of everything and cleaned up all the configs).
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 11:46 PM, Julian Eisel <eiseljulian at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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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>
>
>
> --
> With best regards, Sergey Sharybin
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-- 
- Campbell