New Development Infrastructure

The Blender development infrastructure has been updated for the start of the Blender 2.7x release cycle. For a bird”s-eye view of the development process and infrastructure, and for how to get involved, see the new blender.org development page.

We finally switched from Subversion to Git for our source code repositories. The majority of development was already happening in Git, with many developers working with Git branches and repositories locally, so it only made sense to do it for our main repository as well.

We will eventually also set up mirrors of these repositories on websites like Github and Gitorious. If you are a developer, see the Git Usage documentation, for users making own builds, see the Building Blender for how to switch.

Bug tracking, code review, code auditing and repository browsing have all been moved to the new developer.blender.org portal, based on Phabricator. Previously we had development infrastructure spread over multiple websites. We hope that having functionality like code review closely integrated will make it easier to grow the project and accept more code contributions, while doing more review among existing developers to improve code quality and reduce bugs.

The new website should also reflect the actual project organization better. While most of the work is done in a single code repository, we organize ourselves in module teams. We now have projects for these teams, where the project page shows information about who is a member of the team, how to get in contact, and functionality for developers to add to do and design tasks for that project.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the migration, and for your patience while we were figuring out the details to get it all up and running properly!

4 comments
  1. David, i don’t think this is the right place to solve this kind of question, but I’ll try to help anyway. Your problem i simply could solve using vertex groups to quantify the soft body effect in a mesh. It was simple and it worked for me, only playing with the weights on vertex groups.

  2. Will you put some work into soft bodies? I know not many people use it but I think that might be because noone know how. I have been trying to get it to work with vertex groups on a rigged character, for jiggly parts (okay, boobs) and interaction parts, like the bottom side of fingers and feet. I want to use this to get natural interaction between the characters appendages and the things they touch. I also noticed you can’t put the soft body above a subsurf modifier. I have read the manual on soft bodies a number of times, but I just can’t seem to get a grip on the terminology that is relevant to what I am trying to achieve, that is which of the three places where you can assign vertex groups to use, no matter what I do the whole body seems to get affected.

  3. Huge fan, glad it’s on Git. Should make a lot of things more transparent. When you say ‘mirrored’ on github etc, are you planning on dealing with bug tracking on the mirror sites? How will you manage issues etc?

    • The code repository would be mirrored, but bugs and issues will still only be handled on developer.blender.org.

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