(I hope a single reply will also address Paul's and Christian's questions.)
Maximiliano Curia <m...@debian.org> (02/08/2009): > Hola Cyril Brulebois! Hola! (KiBi or Cyril would be sufficient. ;)) > Given the points you listed before, its understandable if you prefer > to dedicate your time to any other activity and orphan blender. > Although, it might be interesting to work together with the > maintainers of other distros to maintain a set of common patches to > improve the integration of blender and linux distros. Sure. Thanks to the “whohas” utility Paul kindly pointed me to, I've just looked at what other distros do. A very quick summary can be found below. In order to answer more deeply to your point, see the 6th item below. > I think that the project http://vcs-pkg.org/ could fit nicelly in this > case, that is, if you still want to spend your time with blender, of > course. Thought of that back then, indeed. Before going deeper into it, I have to say I've been trying to resist the urge of going public with it, and coping with my duties as much as I could. But it's just too much now. Members of the French Cabal (which of course doesn't exist) can tell you how I've been made *angry* about the current state of that piece of “free software”. Blender status across distributions: ==================================== Following Paul's advice, gave “whohas blender” a try. The following comments are based on what I saw by following the links. Please note the one I'm most familiar with is Ubuntu through the diff that appears on the PTS and patches that are sent to the maintainer/BTS, so I might be missing obvious things or misunderstanding how that works. Ubuntu: ------- The package comes from Debian with some tweaks for python 2.6 or tweaking for some build-dependencies (header location, etc.). Fedora (F11): ------------- They strip some libraries too: | pushd extern | #Removed because of ip | rm -rf ffmpeg libmp3lame x264 xvidcore | #Removed because we can expect to use system one | rm -rf fftw glew libopenjpeg ode qhull make verse | #Will have to be removed later: bFTGL Arch Linux: ----------- They seem to download builds from: http://video.blendertestbuilds.de/download.blender.org/release/ and tweak some files. Granted, that's a binary distribution. OpenSUSE: --------- I could only see the contents of the package, one can notice something I forgot to mention: /usr/lib/blender/.blender/** Indeed, people are expected to unpack blender in home directory and run it there, with all of libraries, data, scripts, etc. in the .blender folder. Last time I checked, it looked like the next release should be able to handle several search paths, though. One can have a look at the symlink dance in the /usr/bin/blender script on Debian, which is a wrapper around /usr/bin/blender-bin for this very reason. FreeBSD: -------- They seem to have the same kind of patches as Debian has, make it possible to use system-wide libraries. Gentoo: ------- They seem to build without tweaking anything related to embedded libraries. My (very own) experience with sending patches upstream: ======================================================= Again, I didn't follow very closely what happened last months, but I've been asked to report how my bugs were received. Let's look. 1) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19383 Asking for pointers to implement HPC-friendly option. No answer. 2) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19825 Various build-related remarks. Bottom-line: until everyone has that version of scons, use an old one. (Not quite they do for embedded libraries, but oh well.) 3) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19894 Compiler warnings, valid bug, no answer on the list, but fix committed in svn. (I used to follow blender using git-svn, and saw my name there.) 4) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19895 Patch to add support for system-wide FTGL. I kind of get flamed for thinking about using something else than what blender provides. And who cares about shared libraries anyway, they are dangerous. If you want to have a good idea of what blender folks think about being distributed, you want to read that thread. 5) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19900 Tiny question about syntax warning/error. IIRC Debian was frozen, and I was looking for a minimal patch instead of grabbing the whole new file in svn, or trying to craft a possibly-broken patch. No answer here, but got an answer in private by the author, though. 6) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19906 My favorite one. Where to discuss possible security issues? No answer at all. Back then, I thought about setting up a cross-distro effort, but well, is it really worth it? 7) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19931 Not a thread I started, but Fedora folks wanting to get some feedback about a Debian patch for a CVE. No answers from blender folks, only from the original poster and me. 8) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/20224 Mostly a bugreport. No answer. My own fault, I guess, for not using their BTS, which cannot be searched without being auth'd, etc. Mea culpa. 9) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/20268 A freetype update made it clear blender folks weren't using the proper function with the proper object. Posted a patch, never got any answer. I think that part of code went away in subsequent releases (I could check collab-maint/blender.git if I weren't that much bored already). Mraw, KiBi.
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