[Bf-committers] Release cycle 2.81: dates and branch proposal

[Brian Savery]

First of all, Kudos for the 2.80 release, and I think the move to higher
frequency smaller releases with 2.81 is great.

One thing that I have not seen discussed with this release cycle change is
the python api and addons.

Currently, as things stand, a user would have to reinstall all addons with
each new release between 2.80 and 2.81, which is fine with older release
cadence, but becomes slightly more burdensome with quarterly-ish releases.

Furthermore, what about api compatibility and python compatibility between
releases?  Has there been a discussion about that?  As an addon developer,
I feel the 2.80 release was a bit late breaking some apis (especially for
render engines) and would prefer not to see that repeated with each 2.XX
release.  Us addon developers would prefer to no have to put out a version
for each quarterly release if possible (but this might be selfish a bit on
our part).

This is all further complicated if an addon uses c extensions that need to
be compiled against a certain python version, and that python version
changes between Blender versions.  Overall, this might be one more vote
towards moving to a version scheme like 2.8.1 where api and python version
is stable across minor versions.

Anyway like I said I haven't seen this point brought up.  If there's a
discussion somewhere I could contribute to, please point me there!

Brian