[Bf-python] A python25.zip file is needed for the current CVS

[Matt Ebb]

On 01/03/2007, at 11:12 AM, Stephen Swaney wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 09:40:38AM +1100, Matt Ebb wrote:
>>
>> For an artist to download Blender and by default not be able to
>> import or export anything would be an enormous turn-off and point of
>> confusion. These days I think we should be doing as much as we can to
>> encourage interoperability and make it easier for people to include
>> Blender in their pipelines. We shouldn't be making this harder.
>
>
> The burden of installing python is similar to the effort of installing
> blender.  If they can manage to find, download and install blender,  
> they
> should be able to manage python.  For those who find google  
> problematic
> for finding things, we can provide a download link to www.python.org.

It's not that similar, and it's additional when we should be making  
things easier. People go to the Blender website to download Blender,  
because that's what they've heard about and that's what they want to  
use. And regardless of all the warnings and notices we put there,  
people won't read them. Artists will read messages like "to enable  
scripting you must download python", their eyes will glaze over and  
they will click on the nice icon to download Blender.

And I think that's quite expectable. Most artists are not used to the  
Linux world of having to satisfy all sorts of dependencies just to  
get working in their app. Most artists don't have the faintest idea  
what libraries or scripting interpreters are and shouldn't need to.  
It's a very reasonable expectation of people that they should be able  
to download the application from the website, and it should just work.

Also, I'm not a Windows user myself so I don't know how this works,  
but it seems reasonable that forcing people to install Python can  
cause problems at businesses or schools where people don't have  
administrator access.

In any case, regardless of whether some people may be capable of  
doing it or not, it is adding more steps and more burdens in the way  
of getting started with Blender, and this is a bad thing in and of  
itself, when we should be finding ways to remove burdens.

> Right now, we provide windozers with a half-assed version of python  
> - the
> bare minimum needed to run our distributed scripts.  Third-party  
> scripts
> may not run due to missing modules.  If the artists start learning  
> python
> on their own, they may run into the missing module problem.  This  
> seems
> much more confusing than having to download and install something.

There are far, far, more people using basic functionality such as  
import and export than there are writing their own scripts. Decisions  
on who to support and provide with ease of use should be weighted  
accordingly.

And it's not more confusing to find missing modules. By the time that  
someone is at the stage of writing Python scripts in Blender that  
depend on modules outside of the Blender module and outside of the  
bundled ones, they're far higher up the learning curve and far better  
prepared to deal with issues like installing extra packages. I've  
been using Blender for 5 years, am a committer to CVS ferchrissakes  
and I've never needed to use an extra module other than 'math'.

Especially for people coming from other packages who want to evaluate  
Blender and get into it, import and export are some of the very first  
things that they will be doing. Hitting them with such a bump in the  
learning curve so early on is far worse in comparison. It's  
especially bad if it ends up with the importers will appearing in the  
menu but just not working, in which case it'll look like Blender is  
just crappy and doesn't work. I think these are the people we should  
be trying to encourage, not make life more difficult for them.

cheers,

Matt


------------------------------------------
Matt Ebb . matt at mke3.net . http://mke3.net0



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