[Bf-committers] VFX Reference Platform Support

Dalai Felinto dalai at blender.org
Tue Sep 27 16:30:05 CEST 2022


Hi,
In the beginning of the month the admins [1] revisited the status of
Blender's VFX Reference Platform compliance.

The final proposal is presented in a blog post:
https://code.blender.org/2022/09/vfx-reference-platform-2023-2024/

Basically:
* Blender in 2023 and 2024 will be fully compatible with the VFX Reference
Platform.
* The Blender 3.3 release branch has a new build option to compile with
Python 3.9.
* Organizations and studios, please get involved.

---

Previous bf-committers emails about this:
* https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2022-January/051234.html
*
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2022-February/051283.html

Blender admin meeting notes:
* https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2022-09-06-blender-admins-meeting/25750
* https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2022-09-21-blender-admins-meeting/25920

[1] - https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Modules

Best regards,
-Dalai-
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Dalai Felinto - dalai at blender.org - www.blender.org
Blender Development Coordinator
Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands


Op vr 4 feb. 2022 om 15:14 schreef Dalai Felinto <dalai at blender.org>:

> Hi,
>
> The full statement about the VFX Reference Platform is here:
> https://code.blender.org/2022/02/vfx-reference-platform/
>
> Have a good weekend everyone,
> -Dalai-
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dalai Felinto - dalai at blender.org - www.blender.org
> Blender Development Coordinator
> Buikslotermeerplein 161, 1025 ET Amsterdam, the Netherlands
>
>
> Op wo 26 jan. 2022 om 17:01 schreef Dalai Felinto <dalai at blender.org>:
>
>> 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/
>>>
>>


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