On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 12:28 AM Dalai Felinto via Bf-committers <bf-committers@blender.org> wrote: > > Hi, > I believe Blender should stick to the VFX platform. > > After all that has been said, I think it may boil down to making a decision > between immediate known benefits and strategic uncertain long-term benefits. > > * On one hand we have tangible benefits for some users that we know of > (e.g., Python scripters will benefit from Python 3.10). > * On the other hand sticking to the VFX platform can pay off in the long > run with making Blender more likely to be integrated in large pipelines.
It *could* but from my perspective with Python - I didn't see any evidence this was the case for Blender 2.8x / 2.9x which followed the VFX platform Python version (for 2.8x, 2.9x ... until we ran into problems, see [0]). A reminder that using the VFX platform's Python version means (at least some of the time) Blender's Python version won't be getting bug-fixes as each release only gets fixes for 18 months [2]. To be fair, running into bugs in Python is fairly rare, so I don't consider this a huge down side. Nevertheless missing out on fixes + new features is still a down side. At some point strategic decisions like this should have tangible benefits beyond the *possability* of attracting a user base. Maybe it will be different this time - in that case there should be an explanation as to why. > One of the long-term goals for the Blender project, is to welcome more > contributions by the industry. And I think investing on that vision trumps > the immediate benefit the latest Python (or other library) brings to > Blender. It seems likely to me the benefits of Python sticking to the VFX platform are being perceived as greater than they actually are (beyond messaging that "we support the VFX platform"). While there are scenarios with Python ABI compatibility (relating to the VFX platform) can cause problems, and I'm not saying nobody ever ran into these issues - this seems more like a corner case which isn't actually blocking people in the VFX industry using Blender in practice. If it was, they were not vocal when it was announced we planned to upgrade to Python 3.9. Part of my skepticism gets into the details of what the VFX platform is generally used for, from what I can gather the QT graphical toolkit and it's Python bindings are a significant factor deciding if Python can be upgraded for the VFX platform. (PySide [1] sometimes lags in it's Python support). Since using QT from Blender is impractical (last I checked at least), it's not clear if sticking to an older Python has all that much benefit for VFX users either (as native Python modules typically aren't a problem). > To have studios contributing to Blender is a two-way street. And Blender > sticking to the VFX is the least the Blender project can do on its end. As far as I can see we tried this and it didn't yield much, if you propose to try it again - it's reasonable to question what success would look like - and what would be a reasonable time frame to decide. > I look forward to see this and other efforts in that direction, such as > onboarding, code documentation, infrastructure and development practices. Supporting the VFX platform and other topics such as onboarding, development practices ... etc seem unrelated. > To move this forward I'm setting up a call with the other bf-admins next > week. We will report back afterwards. > > Thanks everything for the contributions, > -Dalai- [0]: https://bugs.python.org/issue35523 [1]: https://pypi.org/project/PySide [2]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0602/ _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org List details, subscription details or unsubscribe: https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
