Patch builds
It's great that you can download both release versions and daily builds of Blender. But there's more!
On developer.blender.org people share their great work and often it rests for years and even end up abandoned - like Metropolis sampling, Blue noise or Cycles with no ray offsetting. There are dozens of patches every month from the community and only rarely you can find these on GraphicAll. Blender devs can't always keep up with all of these. The situation is so acute it brings things like E-Cycles (which i believe consists of freely available patches by 95%) into existence.
It would be great to have all these
patches available built and packed for everyone to download
and test. Users should also be able to vote on the patch - works or crashes, solves the problem or makes it worse. I believe it can provide a faster feedback loop for Blender devs and faster problem solving for users.
5 Comments
The working with most actual Blender can help to resolve current bugs and minimize reports for old version (support can get breath for repeating with similar post and testing current errors/problems to confirm what need to be fixed).
Autoupdate blender
Autoupdate addons from repo and blender updates
It's not about bug fixes. It's about new features, that are implemented, posted as a patch, but then disappear in limbo. These builds are never published even if it fixes some very specific issues. Or sometimes it takes months for Blender devs to actually find a time, test the patch and merge it into the master.
having a standalone build for every patch that is submitted is untenable. who is going to host all of that data? I don't think you quite understand the number of patches that are submitted, the size of a blender build, or the time it takes to build a binary (it is not insubstantial). The patches are there for a reason, and they are quite easy to apply and make your own build, you don't need to be a programmer to do it.
I'm an accidental Blender committer myself. It's actually a bit of a hassle for me to make those builds manually. Especially the first one, where you have to build all the dependencies, that's not always straightforward. I know for a fact, it's a huge pain in the ass for a regular user to walk through this process. There are millions of Blender users and only a tiny percentage of them are able and have enough motivation to make their own builds of Blender.
By making patch builds available, you attract 100x more user attention to this experimental work.
There are ~3k patches a year, most of them are already built and tested by Harbormaster automatically. Compressed builds for all platforms take ~1 GB, so that will account for 3 TB of space. On a cloud storage that will be ~$60/mo. Not a big deal, can be reduced even further.
hrm, I was not aware that patches were being automatically built as a validation pass. honestly CPU time was my biggest concern, storage space is cheap relatively speaking, but sounds like that is already money being spent anyway. I'm all for convenience, so have an upvote!