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

[Bastien Montagne]

As already said by others, Blender is not a library. We have always 
tried as hard as possible not to break its API, but this is not, and 
imho should never be, a *hard* goal, at any point of the release 
process. Sanity of code and user experience are more important than API 
stability.

That being said, all this sounds like a heavily theoritical discussion 
to me, besides areas that are in heavy development, afaik breakage in 
our API are *very* rare… Especially outside of 'critical' cases. We even 
have several extra handling in RNA to ensure that (especially when it 
comes to RNA functions).

The only area that could need some work/enhancement/precision imho is 
how we handle deprecation within 'minor' releases cycles (when we want 
to remove something to expose it in another, 'better' way, we usually 
keep the old API for some time, but I don’t think we have any formal 
defined handling for those cases currently?).

On 15/08/2019 15:26, Brian Savery 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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