2022-09-06 Blender Admins Meeting

Meetings
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Attendees

  • Bastien Montagne
  • Brecht Van Lommel
  • Campbell Barton
  • Dalai Felinto
  • Sergey Sharybin

Notes

VFX Reference Platform

  • Want to take into account feedback from studios since decision earlier this year.
  • USD / Hydra: this being a C++ API involving dependencies like Boost, compatibility is more important.
  • Decision is for Blender to follow the VFX platform in 2023 and later (at least 2024). That means staying on Python 3.10 in 2023. Blender 3.7 LTS would then follow the VFX platform 2023, and 4.3 LTS would follow 2024, both maintained for two years.
  • For Blender 3.3 LTS, we plan to at least make it possible to build with Python 3.9. This should be relatively straightforward and would give a VFX platform 2022 compatible build.
  • However we still need to decide if there will be official VFX platform LTS releases as well, this will be looked into. The main concern is regarding issues with a fractured add-on ecosystem. Some options:
    • Have 3.3.0 to use Python 3.10, but 3.3.x LTS to use Python 3.9.
    • Have two LTS builds co-existing.
    • Not do 3.3 LTS with Python 3.9 as release, only manual builds
  • Need to better connect with stakeholders

BPY Module Maintenance

  • Officially not maintained, but platform maintainers keep having to deal with it.
  • Decision is to raise it to more official status, where we ensure it keeps building on all platforms and have it tested on buildbot.
  • Python module will look into improving packaging and installation.
  • Reach out to the bpy pip module maintainers to get them involved in the Python module.

Security Issues Policy

  • Need to establish policy for reporting security issues.
  • Dalai will setup email address to send security issues ([email protected]), with mails initially going to Brecht, Campbell, Philipp, Sergey, Foundation.
  • Campbell will create proposal for policy to be documented on a wiki page.

Admin Organization

  • Plan to do monthly meetings (every second Tuesday of the month, 10:00 AM Amsterdam time). To better anticipate issues, make decisions and define priorities.
  • Tweak admins description on the wiki to clarify roles as they are now, which is different than when the description was written.
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re: vfx reference platform

This is great to hear! A couple of questions…

How will you be reaching out to the stakeholders? Or, maybe, a better question to ask: how does one register themselves as a stakeholder?

Ian

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Generally our message in private conversations with various companies is to encourage them to get involved in public development channels. This can range from replying when we ask for feedback in forums or blog posts, to participating in module meetings, to becoming module members, to contributing code.

And then from our side we need to make sure to get feedback before important decisions are taken.

As mentioned in the SIGGRAPH report, there’s conversations ongoing with studios. There’s also corporate membership for the development fund. But as much as possible we try to do in public and open for anyone to participate.

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