[Bf-committers] Blender 2.79 Nightly builds using different Python versions

[Brian Savery]

Ok, so this is very confusing.  And IMO Blender foundation is confusing
users a bit unnecessarily here.
So if I can summarize:  There are fixes/work being done on the 2.79 branch
that will never be officially released, and is compatibility breaking, yet
these go out in nightly build builds with the name 2.79?

As an addon developer we have to put out versions of our addon that support
"version 2.79".  We've added the language noting that we support the
"official released version" but just this week have had multiple users
complain thinking the nightly builds are official because they say 2.79.
Personally I think BF should be more clear with nightly builds that they
may/will break compatibility with addons, quite frankly this is a problem
created by this policy.

And I'd agree Brecht with both your points.  Moving the released version to
a branch that SHALL NOT break compatibility with that version seems pretty
standard operating procedure post release.

There is no 2.79c planned currently.
The main issue here is naming. The changes in this branch are not just
bugfixes on top if 2.79, there are also new features and a few
compatibility breaking changes. We can't undo those, users of that branch
are already relying on them.
In the future we should two things different (that I have argued for
before):
* Increase Blender version immediately at the start of the release cycle,
not at the end.
* Avoid long release cycles like for 2.80, so there is no need to add new
features in both branches.
On Fri, Mar 15, 2019 at 5:30 PM Brian Savery <brian.savery at gmail.com>
wrote:
> First of all, not sure if a 2.79C build is planned.  But we've noticed
> something odd recently.  Namely, that nightly builds of 2.79 use python
> version 3.7.0, whereas the "released" 2.79b build uses 3.5.3
>
> Not a big deal, it's python right?  Well except there are plenty of addons
> that use C-Extensions for python.  On certain platforms (windows
> particularly) a python C-Extension is not forward compatible (unless you
> use some particular limited feature set).  So addon users get errors when
> trying to use "2.79" versions of addons that use c-extensions.
>
> Furthermore, I would claim from a release management standpoint, if you're
> calling something a 2.79 build of Blender, it should not be switching
> python versions.  Basic api compatibility.  I'm assuming the reason this
> was done was that you're using the same build machines for 2.80 which uses
> python 3.7, but it is possible to run multiple versions of python on one
> machine.  Can this be fixed please?
>
> Brian

-- 
brian.savery at gmail.com
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