Here are the notes of my daily sync with Campbell. The following part is intended for this thread, copied here for convenience:
Feedbacks
- There seem to be mostly three kinds of feedback regarding the addons-core changes:
- People are concerned about long term maintaince of extensions.
- People want to work 100% offline.
- People want a way to pre-install Blender with add-ons/extensions for a quicker setup.
The two last topics are been actively considered. See the notes about “Offline Mode” and “Out of the box experience” respectively. Those are not new topics, but they have simply not being priorited at first. The feedbacks have been very helpful to make the use cases more clear and get them prioritized and fleshed out.
The topic about long term maintaince of extensions vs core-add-ons is a complex one. On one hand it is based on assumptions about the future, and often missing on some aspects such as:
- Mostly no add-on has been added to Blender in the past 5 years. The exceptions are the ones created/maintained by a core developer.
- Add-ons which shipped with Blender didn’t get as much maintaince as people may expect.
- There are plenty of add-ons which people don’t even know they miss, just because they never got shipped with Blender.
With the “out of the box experience” tackled, (and part of this is people being able to bundle their favourite extensions), I think this discussion will be less relevant.
On the other hand …
“Blender doesn’t require add-ons to work”. That has always being one of the mantras of the development team. However if we are honest about it, there are plenty of functionalities which only exists as add-ons at the moment, which could have been made “core”.
There are simple case (image as planes), not so simple ones (node wrangler), and really complicated ones (rigify).
The reasons vary. There was never a need (until now?) to address the simple cases if they were bundled with Blender anyways. But even for thte simple ones it is time consuming to make these decisions (what should become core?) and even raise the code quality or the usability to match Blender’s. So it boils down to a mix of prioritization, needs and pure simple inertia (a powerful force on its own).
So while I believe the extensions platform will be a big new chapter on Blender’s community history, the Blender development team is fully aware that we need to be sharp on what should still be made core (or shipped with Blender, one way or another).