blender developer employed by blender institute to work solely on reviewing/accepting code submissions
I often speak with developers about a bugs, or some design floor that's leading to what users perceive as bugs.
Virtually every time I'm told a patch has already been submitted, but non of the main devs have time to review/accept it.
Other times the contributing developers themselves are kind enough to write a quick python operator that resolves the bug, or point me to one they wrote a while ago to address it. I ask them, if you've already gone to the trouble of coding a fix, would it not be better to get it into vanilla blender so that people no longer experience the same issue, and potentially clog up the bug tracker with duplicate issues. The answer is always yes, but coupled with the explanation the developers are too busy working on their own stuff to have time to review and accept. One dev told me earlier that it took a year for someone to review and accept his 30,000 line of code patch for one long standing issue. Imagine spending all that time writing 30,000 lines of code, only for nobody to have time to put it into Blender.
I think it would be great if the Blender Institute hired a full time reviewer (or two), so the people trying to improve the software don't find themselves wasting their time by working on code that goes unused. The software could become more polished much faster. And would leave the core developers uninterrupted time to concentrate on the more complex urgent bugs and new features they prefer to spend time on.
3 Comments
devtalk.blender.org/t/proposal-introduce-a-dev-curfew-on-open-patches/15568
based on Pablo's repsonse on the blender today stream that the core developers need to be the ones who accept because they're the only ones familiar enough with the module. Perhaps there could be one full time reviewer/accepter per module? That way they'd be sufficiently aware of the module activity/plans.
Yeah, or if they're spread that thin, maybe more devs need to be brought on board, while at the the same time adding the expectation/understanding that a certain percentage of everyone's time is to be spent reviewing code submissions and getting them into the main build. But it's easy for users to say "just hire someone". There's obviously a budget that needs to be considered. Still, it's a waste if people's fixes and enhancements aren't actually making it into Blender. So this definitely should be addressed somehow.