The code contribution question

Archive Blender Development
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I have a question about to get ideas, changes or tweaks etc. approved and to make them as official Blender update.

So I went over all the documentation and forums which tells us how to raise the ideas and make them approved etc. I understand if someone want to make an entirely new feature is not guaranteed that will 100% get approved because for the actually usage and such etc.

However, if the changes or tweaks or the bugs were like very small,
even though the users post on Right Click or here, still going to be take sometime or not even get a chance that the development team will take a look on it.

My question is, for these little things, not talking about developing a new badass feature, how can we get them approved faster?
I know the development team is very busy and have a ton of workload, by time to time, I saw some comments from the development team were mentioned that, “More helps are welcome” or “You can contribute the code to help” or indirectly implied, “You can hire someone to help for the development if you want”,
up to this point,
if I really hire someone to help for the immediate development/ bug fixing/ tweak/ adjustment whatever you name it, can those be approved? or the development team means, “more help is welcome”, only when you hire an engineer that do what development team assign them to do, but not for you tweaking. Otherwise “More helps are not welcome” and those changes the person you hired to make can not be included into the next official update.

So what’s the criteria?

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Often small straightforward improvements do get committed quickly, but there is no fast-track for this.
Changes that seem small can have wider implications too.

These would go via the same review process as other patches.

I’d suggest joining the chat room for the module where you intend to work (or #blender-coders for more general changes), and asking module team members what they think about changes you’re interested in making.

Keep in mind that developers of all experience levels often submit changes for other developers to review, without a guarantee their patches will be accepted.

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I would like to give a tiny bit of my little experience.

From my perspective a way of doing things right and to try to assure that your investment hiring a developer won’t be wasted is the following:

1.- Create a description document with the idea / fix / feature

2.- Share this with the module developers making it clear that this development will be done by you and your developers, no need for extra development from them, this is important since people is asking for things on a daily basis

3.- With that clear you can start a discussion ahead of development that will help to make the idea clear and to get partial confirmation about it’s possibilities of being approved, this is not a guarantee, but it’s as close as you will get.

Keep in mind that maybe the feature / fix you want to do cannot be done as you thought but you can reach a middle ground that solves the problem in a more general or concrete way with a different feature or development, and you will only discover this in advance if you talk with the module devs :slight_smile:

4.- Start development and publish the patch since day 1, so things are clearly stated and can be viewed and consulted by team devs, if your dev has a question it will be easier to clarify things if the patch is available in developer.blender.org as soon as possible

5.- When the patch gets to a review state, tell that to the module developers, specifically to the one you’ve been talking about it with, if someone else have to be in the review process they will know it better than you

6.- Try to make the review process as quick as possible, that means to fix and change things devs ask for as soon as possible so as soon as they have some time to review it they can reach it and it’s ready for review again.

As a general matter, make sure you do all this preferably during development time and not during stabilisation / beta time, this way will probably be easier for you to develop and for them to review, but that’s a personal point of view, may not be that way :slight_smile:

With all that said, that’s my POV, but I may be wrong :slight_smile:

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@JuanGea makes good points, although for some small changes it could be overkill.

If the change doesn’t justify this kind of preparation and planning - you could just check with module members if the change is reasonable before working on it.
If they think more planning is needed they can let you know.

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Yea, for small things it’s totally overkill, a bit of chatting may be enough :slight_smile:

It was just a general overview of how to tackle a development, for example a patch for Cycles like Light Linking or Light Groups may need more work, but a small fix for particles may not need as much talk, it all depends on the work being done :slight_smile: