Last week we shared the ambitious goal to switch to the new development infrastructure during this week. Well, not so fast! A lot of work has been done, including making sure all data can be migrated as safely and accurately as possible, and that the new infrastructure offers the same (or better) functionality as the current infrastructure. But we are not there, yet.
After setting up a production-ready version of the infrastructure, there have been concerns about performance and responsiveness. In particular, with the current configuration, it could take a few seconds for the server to respond to a user request, especially while dealing with dozens of concurrent requests or performing intensive operations such as creating a pull request. This would lead to a bad user experience.
For this reason the team has spent a few days to investigate and solve these issues before going into production. We will be good to go live next week, after some final server configuration and public docs are ready.
In the meantime, we are excited to share a preview of the new development portal. Introducing: projects.blender.org. Feel free to browse this (read-only) version of the site, and share any feedback in the comments below.
In preparation for the switch, make sure you check the Gitea Diaries: Part 3 blogpost. An update will be published once the transition is complete.
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Great, Gitea will be very helpful for the beginner to contribute in Blender Project.
The migration made contributors’ previous nickname get digits at the end of the nickname.
Example: theonlyleon-4670934737164734
Will there be a way to merge both nicknames (to associate our BlenderID nickname with the nickname we used on Phabricator) ?
The digits are temporary, for the final migration it should be “theonlyleon”.
The usernames will be merged, in fact it will use the one set in Blender ID. It’s best to change that now, see here:
https://code.blender.org/2023/01/gitea-diaries-part-3/#accounts-and-blender-id
After migration you may need to contact Blender ID support if it doesn’t sync automatically.
https://id.blender.org/about
It’s a good start ! I see your organization is going to seem a little complicated, to simplify everyone, there are three categories for users, beginners, intermediates and advanced. Well let’s say it’s going to be a lot of work… I advise you to make 3 branches, a very light basic very close to blender but in a very light version, modeler type, geometric mesh with some tools, light, material and a simple raytracing rendering because otherwise they will fail in front of the Blender source code which is quite complex. For the same intermediate source code for beginners but add animation, simple rigid body or cloth simulation and a simple pathtracing rendering. Here are the advanced ones will work on your main source code blender. So there will be forks on 3 categories of branches as beginners learn and share with friends with their forks, same for intermediates and advanced.
This is what I wanted to share with you some input and what do you think about it?
I’m afraid that’s not practical, maintaining multiple branches of the code would be very complicated and time consuming.
In general we should work towards making the code more modular so you can work on one area without having to understand many others..
Ok thank you for your answer, yes I was meaning for modular that the concept is working better than my concept.
However the part for doc, it is a little unclear for me, how do you do to make a solid doc with multi-users ?
Good luck with a great projects for Gitea !
As a young developer who’s been wanting to contribute to the Blender project, Gitea feels more familiar and welcoming.
Exciting times! I’d just like to say that all your work on this and on Blender is much appreciated. These “forge” tasks, I’m sure, are something that no one has “wanted” to do but congrats on pushing though this.
Some feedback:
– There is no code search? I kind of use that all the time especially for searching through other branches so I don’t disturbe what I have locally
– The Phab “activity” landing page was indeed pretty great. Really great. Is it possible to work towards getting that back so we can see recent Task, Commit, and Comment activity?
– I personally love that Phab is basically a “width=100%” layout. Can we escape from the gitea 1200px horizontal layout prison? The current width is very restrictive when writing issues and patches.
Beyond that, I think we need to wait until Issues are opened up.
– It looks like files such as .blend files and images from the Phab issues did not make it across
– I’m really curious to see how the editing experience is for Images; wasn’t that a point of concern before?
– Code search: it’s not enabled currently but Gitea supports it. I think that’s something to look into once the site has been running with good performance for a while, since this is the type of thing that can slow things down.
– Activity: there is such a page to see all activity within the blender organization when you are logged in and a member of the organization. We may have to do something to make it conveniently visible to everyone.
– 100% width: there’s many debates about this online, seems to be something opinion is really split on. Maybe Gitea could add a preference for this, probably not something we do ourselves.
– Missing .blend files and images: they are missing from the most recent issues but should be there for older ones. In the final migration they should all be there, it’s because we recently updated the issues without the files.
– Editing experience for images: assuming you refer to uploading and embedding images in descriptions and comments, this should work much better than before now.
Good to hear!
For images I also noticed that you cannot use the arrow keys to flip back and forth when viewing. This makes comparisons very cumbersome to setup. Would gitea be willing to add a feature where embedded images, when viewed, could be navigated using the arrow keys back and forth etc?
> – I personally love that Phab is basically a “width=100%” layout. Can we escape from the gitea 1200px horizontal layout prison? The current width is very restrictive when writing issues and patches.
Hi Roger. 👋
Regarding the page width, you can change it the way you like thanks to (the free and open-source) Stylus web browser extension: https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
Stylus allows you to create custom CSS code for any website. Once you have found the CSS lines thanks to your web browser “Inspect Tool”, it’s then really easy to write a custom CSS sheet and make it permanent locally. Here is the CSS code that makes project.blender.org fill the page width (just copy+paste it in Stylus):
@-moz-document url-prefix(“https://projects.blender.org”) {
.ui.ui.ui.container:not(.fluid) {
width: 100%;
padding-left: 20px;
padding-right: 20px;
}
}
Yup! I did nearly exactly that last night. Decided to play their game though and use width:1480 in another @media section for window widths of 1600 or more. Strange that they don’t have a section for anything over 1200 :-/
Will this new portal have sections of Recent Tasks/Recent Activity/Recent Commits like in the old site?
That was a nice thing…
Once authenticated, the user Dashboard displays an activity stream based on the projects or organizations you follow.
Nice. Thanks..
So the source now are in
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/src/branch/master/source/blender
That is a bit convoluted imho.
the gitea home page also could be:
https://dev.blender.org/ to make it simpler
The first impression is great. It will take a bit to get used to navigating the new site, but I’m very excited. :)
I also really like how the ribbon at the top gives access to the blog, forum etc. in one place. I remember how in the beginning it was a bit unclear to me how all the different official blender websites were related. This is a nice way to tie things together.
Will there be light themes for the websites in the long run? The strong contrast of the bright text on a dark background is quite hard on my eyes because of astigmatism.
Gitea and Devtalk already provide light themes. Those can be set in the user preferences. For the wiki we are looking into updating the skin to add a dark version.
Ah, totally missed that when looking through the preferences in the forum last time. Great, thanks!
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