2025-03-11 Blender Admins Meeting

Meetings
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Attendees:

  • Bastien Montagne
  • Campbell Barton
  • Jacques Lucke
  • Philipp Oeser
  • Thomas Dinges

Namespace Usages Guideline

  • Current problems:
    • Recent discussion in the Sequencer channel about wrapping sequencer code into a namespace.
      • There is a source/blender/sequencer folder which uses SEQ prefix, and intuitively it should be using blender::seq namespace.
      • The editors code seems to be using blender::ed::<area>. For the sequencer it will be blender::ed::seq which is annoying to access blender::seq (need to use full namespace), and potentially confusing as well.
    • Some developers think that it is not that practical to have a “deep” namespace, as it causes more confusion and annoyance than solutions.
    • Some related topics also emerged from above discussions, e.g. the potential confusion between some DNA storage structs, and their runtime C++ wrappers defined in BKE.
  • Outcome: Jacques will create a few threads on devtalk.blender.org with proposals. Once agreed on, they should be implemented in the codebase during 4.5 alpha phase (to reduce conflicts in this upcoming LTS backports).

Linux: Move X11 Support in Maintenance Mode in Blender 5.0

  • X11 support is going to be dropped by many Linux distributions this year.
  • Maintenance mode means that serious issues are still handled, but minor bugs and new features can be ignored if they require too much resources.
  • Outcome: The meeting agrees to communicate maintenance mode for 5.0, and check when it can be removed later (should only be done for major releases, like 6.0…).

Followups

  • The integration of the new Manifold Boolean solver library is on hold, pending discussions regarding non-deterministic behaviors and their consequences for Blender users.
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I think almost the entire VFX industry is currently still using X11 and might be for a while. They tend to use NVIDIA, not very recent Linux distribution versions and color management features. So I’d be careful with the communication here, to not raise concern unnecessarily, and to make it clear we’d take those users into account.

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Absolutely. That’s why there is no fixed date for a removal yet as there are too many unknowns. The earliest possible removal could happen in Blender 6.0 (end of 2027), so there is plenty of time to monitor the situation and receive feedback and concerns from users.

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