Weekly Blender Developers meeting notes - October 23, 2017

Here are the notes from yesterday's 08 UTC meeting in irc.freenode.net.

Dalai writes:

1) Blender 2.79

• Still no rush. Expected in 2-3 weeks.

2) Blender 2.8 Planning

We now have plans for most of the core 2.8 development:

• 101 (no week breakdown because it is still very dependent on
  design).
• Assets and static overrides.
• Eevee.
• Depsgraph.

3) User Interface

• Julian Eisel will call for a meeting this week via the bf-inteface
  mailinglist, likely on Wednesday. He proposes weekly UI meetings for
  the next 1-2 months.
• During the Blender Conference there will be a lot of members of the
  current design team. There is a meeting room for sessions on UI, as
  well as informal meetings during the conference.
• The tasks that require help from the design team are growing and
  piling up. People would likely like to see more tangible design jobs
  defined and properly scheduled:
  • Themes for 2.8
  • Design work required for asset browser
  • Top bar final design

4) 2.8 Tasks

Ton Roosendaal raised the issue of lack of insight in todos for
other people to contribute easier. For now, for people willing to contribute to Blender 2.8 there are
different ways to get involved:

• Go over published planning documents and see which task one are
  able to tackle.
• Wait for upcoming call for help with monkey-work (depsgraph will
  require help porting tools and modifiers, asset manager project will
  need help tagging rna properties as overridable, ...)
• Poke someone from the development team and ask for it. There are
  still areas that are orphan (e.g., multi-window support, F12 render
  for OpenGL engines, ...).

We can improve this of course. But there is no further effort for
on-boarding in 2.8 at the moment.

5) Google Summer of Code

• Ton Roosendaal attended the GSoC mentor event. He may write a write
  up somewhere, meanwhile:

"The issues we have were shared all over. Most of the orgs really
focus on easier ideas, like 'get module X, inspect how it works, write
tech doc and solve the bugs in it. In fact 'bug fix in module x' is
very acceptable. Another trick is to ask for a small thing that can
easily become bigger (if it works out).

Basically the topic of "on-boarding" new developers was something
everyone had issues with (and had no simple answers)."

6) Patch approval/rejection day proposal

• Ton once again brought up the idea of a patch review day. To avoid
  patches dragging for too long without attention from the development
  team. It didn't get much feedback in this meeting though.

7) Weekly reports

• Bastien Montagne
• Campbell Barton
• Clément Foucault
• Dalai Felinto
• Julian Eisel
• Sergey Sharybin

Regards,
Dalai