Yes, the 2.8 dynamics was big and maybe quite overwhelming. It was probably important for the project’s general success, but wasn’t without trade-offs. And I don’t think such a dynamic process is sustainable long term, at least not while the core UI team is still comparably small.
When I took over the UI module ownership, I pushed for focusing more on fewer projects. So we put a number of projects and ideas aside. The projects we kept going were of the following categories:
- Involvements in the big 2020 projects (nodes, assets, library overrides).
- Projects to wrap up 2.8 (toolsystem, layout polishes).
- Ongoing projects that were close to being finished (Outliner GSoC, properties search, possibly other GSoCs).
- Regular operative/maintenance work (contributed patches, helping other modules, small improvements, fixes, etc).
- Ongoing work on Human Interface Guidelines.
The more focused process should allow us to evaluate and iterate much better. Opening feedback threads after merging changes is now part of the process.
This is documented in multiple of the UI meeting notes, e.g. 2020-10-14 & 2020-10-21.
Another big topic are general contributions:
There is a huge inflow of patches for the UI module, I think it’s around or close to 15 per week. Smaller design changes in all kinds of places. So each release, a lot of design changes are by volunteer contributors – which should be looked at as a strength, not a weakness.
This is a dynamics that is hard to influence. Some people suggested we kinda close the patch tracker and just welcome contributions to active projects. That is something I do not want to see in an open project. But we do want to get contributors much more involved with the core projects.
So basically, I really hear you but beg to disagree when looking at just the recent months. Creating feedback threads and keeping track of them became regular part of the development and I think we’re doing pretty fine with that. Every design has trade-offs and there will always be people who disagree with design choices. But the process is very different from how it used to be.