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

[Nathan 'jesterKing' Letwory]

Hi Brian,

Thank you for your input. The Python API and add-ons were indeed not
specifically mentioned.

In the proposal I glossed over submodules, but the idea is to create
in each submodule corresponding 2.81 branches for stabilizing. That
will also ensure we can keep master and the release branches clearly
separated. That in itself is separate from the Python API issue.

I think it would be good if we could come to a good policy of not breaking
the API between major releases - a bigger timespan than 3 months would
probably be beneficial for the add-on ecosystem, allowing add-on devs to
build longer on a stable platform.

There will always be the possibility of major issues going somehow
unnoticed especially with new API. For that we could be more alert during
(technical) design and patch review when the Python API is touched. Bumping
the Python version can be considered part of the API we provide, so it
indeed
makes sense to take care about the proper planning of that as part of
scheduled breakage.

These are good poings to bring up also during the dev meeting this coming
Monday 2019.09.19 (starting at 16:00 UTC).

Finally the version scheme, I personally think moving to a semver scheme
would be useful for a wide array of installing (on a number of OSes) and
the add-on ecosystem as you noted.

I hadn't thought of that since the summer, but lets see what the consensus
is regarding the version scheme. Having the dot added on the technical/code
side, and keeping the one without the second dot in the common tongue
might be worth considering, if not even completely move to it - currently
no strong opinion on that.

Thanks again,

/Nathan

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 16:27 Brian Savery <brian.savery at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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