A Blender 2.67b bugfix release is coming up, the targets for 2.68 have been defined and the Google Summer of Code results should become available today!
Ton Roosendaal writes:
Here are the notes for the weekly developer meeting in irc.freenode.net #blendercoders
1) Blender 2.67a review
- Right after the 2.67a a couple of bugs were reported and fixed... especially features that worked in 2.66 before should be in a release. Proposal is to ask the release team to make a new build this week.
- Campbell Barton made an initial list of fixes of he likes to see included in an update.
- We'll review the list in irc and on this list. These will go in the svn release branch, so we can update a bugfix-2.67 simply.
- Tuesday an ahoy is expected for it.
- Meeting spent some time on a review why this happened, it's mix of bad luck, and too much maintenance work in BCon3/4 periods. In general, keeping a 'stable' branch around and update as frequently as possible is never bad.
2) 2.68 targets
- Dalai Felinto makes great progress on stereoscopic rendering/compositing and viewing. See code on GitHub. It's unsure still if this will be ready for 2.68. Code review will start a.s.a.p.
- Bastien Montagne is almost done with Linux OpenEXR 2.0 install-deps script.
- Release target list has been updated, We now move to "BCon2":
3) Other projects
- Campbell and Sergey Sharybin (and others) are testing converting svn history to git. There's also tests going on with Phabricator. A more formal proposal for git migration is coming, a feasible target for migration is October this year.
- Sergey: The Tomato branch has a WIP feature, mask tracking! (Avi video). This is not a release target yet, get the tomato branch for testing.
- Leap Motion device seed has started, we wait a bit for it to arrive everywhere. There's a developer from Leap who already added support for the BGE, he will be connecting with us soonish.
4) Google Summer of Code
- Tomorrow 19 UTC Google will announce the official results. Shortly after the http://code.blender.org blog will introduce the students and their projects.
18 Comments
Great job BF! Sweet stuff!
Anyone knows when the new blender.org will be up?
I fear that the release cycle could be too tight... it's probably ok to have 'a' releases to fix things, but in the last years people learned that there WILL be an 'a' (fixed) release... nowadays, a 'b' (more fixed) release is a "real" exception... most people does not use the "standard" release, and does not report bugs with it, they wait the 'a' to get something "fixed"... from RC to release there are maybe 10 days... it's too close for most people: one has to be used to test features, produce test cases, report bugs... in no time, new Blender it's released... :-D
This is, of course, also because Blender is often getting tons of great new features for each minimal release (during eleven years it went from 2.25 to 2.67... - see http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Introduction/History) and the release cycle is quite tight (bi-monthly!)...
Some time ago I proposed in BA forums to have an LTS-like releases for Blender, but it seems that most people prefers MOAR cool features whenever the're available. I fear that being so fastly evolving (and always bug-filled) could give a somewhat "amateur" image to Blender itself, when compared to other similar (commercial) software... And also the documentation needs more time to get good, professional shape... (i'm somewhat invoveld with Blender documentation)
Would it be good to extend the RC-to-stable period, perhaps double it, and see if more bugs hunting happens? I dont' know, really.
Anyway I am just amazed at the incredible developers and community around my favourite software of all times...
The 'Commercial' software would like you to believe that, but I've seen silly bugs in the likes of FCPX and Flash take over a year to fix.
agreed.
there're no more or more serious bugs in a released Blender than there are in any version of Maya/3dsMax/Lightwave or other kind of commercial software for than matter.
and on top of that, those other software companies usually take longer to fix them.
perhaps 2 months is a little short release cycle (3 months would allow some more testing time), but I prefer it over the 1 year cycle of commercial apps, and Blender developing pace is nothing short of amazing (I'd say terrifying, from a 3D program vendor's point of view).
Personally, for me, it's not the rate of bugs in Blender I have the most problem with--in which I quite agree with you that Blender has its share of bugs just like any other product. I personally have more issues with how often Blender add-ons are commonly broken by the next release.
One thing most commercial apps benefit from is with their supported third-party plugins constantly updating to work for the next version. The third-party plugin developers carry a close relationship with the commercial apps' company, and tend to have a new updated version of their plugins available very soon after the new commercial 3D package's release. When Maya 2014 came all, all of the major plugins got immediately on-board, because they know many Maya users turn to them after every release.
Of course, Blender's internal structure is constantly undergoing gradual changes, developers of the various Blender addon scripts come from all over independently, and updates aren't going to be an immediate thing as a result, but one I find that most addons don't update nearly as frequently, simply because of the independent nature of the developers.
There could be a little more unity among the developers--Blender Foundation and independent developers of the addons in the Blender Scripts repository--to better encourage better updating. Maybe a little more discussing page about the internal changes could better help independent contributing developers keep aware of the updates their addons might need.
Though, this is just a small gripe with me, as I keep several versions of Blender installed on my computer just for this very reason. But still, it'd be awful nice to have just one and only one version of Blender installed.
(on the risk to be misunderstood again...)
it happened earlier than i expected.
many people do not use/test the normal official release anymore, they intended to skip the normal and wait for a 'a'-release at the outset - to have a very stable version, they want to work with.
thanks to those (egoistic) people a 'b'-release will be established as that stable release as the normal release should be, when all users would test already the RC.
next they do not use/test 2.68, not 2.68a, they start with 2.68b ... what's next '2.69c', ... '2.91z'... :P
BTW: is there a reason, why the daily build of windows builds are still from 2013-05-24...?
Windows 64 bit, blender-2.67-r56992-win64.zip, Fri May 24 02:22:09 2013
but the others are more actual, from 2013-05-27.
Hello,
What sort of hoops does one need to go through to contact the developers? I have credentials I can share if I can reach an actual developer. I've been in the games industry for getting close to a decade. I'm a partner in a new startup that wants to promote Blender adoption.
Who / Where should I contact to try to reach actual developers?
~Colin
There are a lot of ways. It's not all that hard.
Most, if not all, developers frequent Blender Artists and at least lurk around.
Several of the developers might have a blog.
There are various IRC chats, I believe they are on freenode. One of them should be "#blendercoders" which is frequented by coders and also is where they have these meetings of which you can see the notes in this blog.
Check out:
http://www.blender.org/community/get-involved/
There is an entire (small but still) section on how to contact developers.
More often than would be desirable people refer to Blender as being "free". This is NOT true! There's a big difference between free and open source.
Open source software depend on the work of a users community. People are taking Blender for granted and this is really bad. People think: "Why should I bother? Someone else will do it!"
If you want to work in this model, go buy yourself a comercial solution. If you want to use Blender for years to come, be aware that it depends on all of us.
Blender is packed in a very small file (it bugs me.. how is this possible?). So, go and get the RC versions, keep working as usual and report bugs. Do your part! There's a lot of developers working for YOU all the time.
Blender doesn't package lots of media, which are the real size issue. Code isn't very large.
I never found a bug, so I couldnt help yet =(
We tend to report bugs only as we find them while working. Typically, people don't have time to go purposely looking for bugs without usage that pertains relevant to them.
Many times, if I actually find a bug, esp. a prominent one, usually I go to the bug-reporting page and see that someone else reported it. I've reported a bug or two before, though--but only as I found them along the way relevant to my work.
If people are not using certain features much where bugs might just happen to lie, you're not going to find many of them. For instance, I never use Blender's motion-tracking tools, so I wouldn't know what bugs lie within it. I'd go a long time before ever noticing such any bugs about it.
This is how so many bugs can go unnoticed sometimes with many people. Most people don't use most tools. And this is why the bulk of the bugs reported seem to be with the most commonly frequented tools: Cycles, 3D View, Addons, Sculpting/Painting, etc.
Good luck to you, Devs!
You're doing a fantastic work that inspires many of Blender artists to become better! So whenever you get hard times or not you can always be sure that Blender users supports you by all means possible.
Will the stereoscopic camera feature support the Oculus Rift? Do they need help with developing support for it?
Masking/tracking will be awesome.
I think that perhaps the release schedule needs another look. Considering the number of new rather major new features in only a few months is rather mind boggling so sometimes I have to wonder when you guys sleep. Unfortunately I have found 2.67 to be too unstable for me to use. This is unusual since blender has been amazingly stable since late 2.5x so I've had to go back to 2.66a in the mean time. RCs probably don't get nearly enough use to properly predict many bug since I think most people wait for the final version. If you were to increase the cycle by 50% to 100% to perfect the release it would probably be better. The current schedule is less than two months which may be a little too short since it seems that 2.67 still needs more attention.
This issues remind of space invaders game were the spaceship look like bugs.