6 ms·

Given my experience with similar products at Canonical, they will probably employ folks familiar with Blender, maybe even engineers who can fix bugs here and th

by kyrofa 5y ago

Given my experience with similar products at Canonical, they will probably employ folks familiar with Blender, maybe even engineers who can fix bugs here and there, but those developers will not be spending their days working on upstream Blender. They will essentially be maintaining a Canonical fork of Blender, with occasional upstreaming of security fixes where it makes sense.

padraic7a 5y ago
Since this appears to be a collaboration with Blender that would be a bit weird.
- kyrofa 5y ago
  Not really, like I said this isn't the first time Canonical has done stuff like this. They both make money from it-- for the most part, that's the collaboration. Don't read evil intentions into the word "fork", it's really the only way Canonical can promise any sort of support. They won't be developing the fork to compete with Blender, they'll just be supporting it and maintaining it. Trying to do that in a place where you have no commit authority would be impossible.
  - taeric 5y ago
    Would probably be more palatable to say they are maintaining their own branch or release. Yes, it is the same thing, but there is a bit off implied intent with the word fork.
    - kyrofa 5y ago
      shrug sure.
      - taeric 5y ago
        Fair. And I fully cede that insisting on other words here is silly. I had meant my post mostly as a question, but forgot the right punctuation.
      - sangnoir 5y ago
        "Fork" kind of implies the codebases have diverged and there is active maintenance of the fork; "Patchset" is the more common term for changes distros apply to an upstream project before they package it - and this is something most distros do when they fail to upstream the changes (usually due to some benign differences with upstream). However, sometimes the differences can be sharp, such as when Mozilla disagreed with Debian's patchset[1] (it was around trademarks, UI assets and branding). IIRC Mozilla asked Debian to stop calling its package Firefox, so Debian - perhaps vindictively - chose "IceWeasel" instead. Good times. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
        kyrofa 5y ago
        A fork is a copy that is maintained separately, and that is exactly what is happening here. You're actually quite right that, if all they were maintaining was a Debian package, they could theoretically maintain a source package with a vanilla orig tarball and keep their changes to patches, but that's not what they're doing here: > The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. They're not using quilt to do this. They're using git. At least, that's how I did it when I did it for Canonical.
DonHopkins 5y ago
I expect most things they'd do wouldn't actually require a fork of Blender, just developing Blender extensions in Python, and integrating existing and bespoke Python modules into Blender.
- kyrofa 5y ago
  They're not developing new features, though. They're literally supporting Blender as it is. If there's a security issue in Blender, you probably won't be able to fix it by creating a new Python extension.

by kyrofa 5y ago

padraic7a 5y ago

Since this appears to be a collaboration with Blender that would be a bit weird.

kyrofa 5y ago
Not really, like I said this isn't the first time Canonical has done stuff like this. They both make money from it-- for the most part, that's the collaboration. Don't read evil intentions into the word "fork", it's really the only way Canonical can promise any sort of support. They won't be developing the fork to compete with Blender, they'll just be supporting it and maintaining it. Trying to do that in a place where you have no commit authority would be impossible.
- taeric 5y ago
  Would probably be more palatable to say they are maintaining their own branch or release. Yes, it is the same thing, but there is a bit off implied intent with the word fork.
  - kyrofa 5y ago
    shrug sure.
    - taeric 5y ago
      Fair. And I fully cede that insisting on other words here is silly. I had meant my post mostly as a question, but forgot the right punctuation.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      "Fork" kind of implies the codebases have diverged and there is active maintenance of the fork; "Patchset" is the more common term for changes distros apply to an upstream project before they package it - and this is something most distros do when they fail to upstream the changes (usually due to some benign differences with upstream). However, sometimes the differences can be sharp, such as when Mozilla disagreed with Debian's patchset[1] (it was around trademarks, UI assets and branding). IIRC Mozilla asked Debian to stop calling its package Firefox, so Debian - perhaps vindictively - chose "IceWeasel" instead. Good times. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_Debian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
      - kyrofa 5y ago
        A fork is a copy that is maintained separately, and that is exactly what is happening here. You're actually quite right that, if all they were maintaining was a Debian package, they could theoretically maintain a source package with a vanilla orig tarball and keep their changes to patches, but that's not what they're doing here: > The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. They're not using quilt to do this. They're using git. At least, that's how I did it when I did it for Canonical.

DonHopkins 5y ago

I expect most things they'd do wouldn't actually require a fork of Blender, just developing Blender extensions in Python, and integrating existing and bespoke Python modules into Blender.

kyrofa 5y ago
They're not developing new features, though. They're literally supporting Blender as it is. If there's a security issue in Blender, you probably won't be able to fix it by creating a new Python extension.