[Bf-committers] Proposal for clarified VFX Reference Platform Support

[Dalai Felinto]

Hi,

> To move this forward I'm setting up a call with the other bf-admins next
week. We will report back afterwards.

We agreed on upgrading Python to 3.10 in time for Blender 3.1 beta.

A more detailed email will be posted soon. Meanwhile I wanted to share this
heads up to prevent any confusion, since the platform team is already
updating the Python library.

Thanks everyone for the feedback,
-Dalai-
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Dalai Felinto - dalai at blender.org - www.blender.org
Blender Development Coordinator
Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands


Op za 22 jan. 2022 om 05:35 schreef Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>:

> On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 12:28 AM Dalai Felinto via Bf-committers
> <bf-committers at blender.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> > I believe Blender should stick to the VFX platform.
> >
> > After all that has been said, I think it may boil down to making a
> decision
> > between immediate known benefits and strategic uncertain long-term
> benefits.
> >
> > * On one hand we have tangible benefits for some users that we know of
> > (e.g., Python scripters will benefit from Python 3.10).
> > * On the other hand sticking to the VFX platform can pay off in the long
> > run with making Blender more likely to be integrated in large pipelines.
>
> It *could* but from my perspective with Python - I didn't see any
> evidence this was the case for Blender 2.8x / 2.9x which followed the
> VFX platform Python version (for 2.8x, 2.9x ... until we ran into
> problems, see [0]).
>
> A reminder that using the VFX platform's Python version means (at least
> some of the time) Blender's Python version won't be getting bug-fixes
> as each release only gets fixes for 18 months [2].
> To be fair, running into bugs in Python is fairly rare, so I don't
> consider this a huge down side. Nevertheless missing out on fixes +
> new features is still a down side.
>
> At some point strategic decisions like this should have tangible
> benefits beyond the *possability* of attracting a user base. Maybe it
> will be different this time - in that case there should be an
> explanation as to why.
>
> > One of the long-term goals for the Blender project, is to welcome more
> > contributions by the industry. And I think investing on that vision
> trumps
> > the immediate benefit the latest Python (or other library) brings to
> > Blender.
>
> It seems likely to me the benefits of Python sticking to the VFX
> platform are being perceived as greater than they actually are (beyond
> messaging that "we support the VFX platform").
>
> While there are scenarios with Python ABI compatibility (relating to
> the VFX platform) can cause problems, and I'm not saying nobody ever
> ran into these issues - this seems more like a corner case which isn't
> actually blocking people in the VFX industry using Blender in
> practice. If it was, they were not vocal when it was announced we
> planned to upgrade to Python 3.9.
>
> Part of my skepticism gets into the details of what the VFX platform
> is generally used for, from what I can gather the QT graphical toolkit
> and it's Python bindings are a significant factor deciding if Python
> can be upgraded for the VFX platform. (PySide [1] sometimes lags in
> it's Python support).
>
> Since using QT from Blender is impractical (last I checked at least),
> it's not clear if sticking to an older Python has all that much
> benefit for VFX users either (as native Python modules typically
> aren't a problem).
>
> > To have studios contributing to Blender is a two-way street. And Blender
> > sticking to the VFX is the least the Blender project can do on its end.
>
> As far as I can see we tried this and it didn't yield much, if you
> propose to try it again - it's reasonable to question what success
> would look like - and what would be a reasonable time frame to decide.
>
> > I look forward to see this and other efforts in that direction, such as
> > onboarding, code documentation, infrastructure and development practices.
>
> Supporting the VFX platform and other topics such as onboarding,
> development practices ... etc seem unrelated.
>
> > To move this forward I'm setting up a call with the other bf-admins next
> > week. We will report back afterwards.
> >
> > Thanks everything for the contributions,
> > -Dalai-
>
> [0]: https://bugs.python.org/issue35523
> [1]: https://pypi.org/project/PySide
> [2]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0602/
>