 the community I have a guest today we have we actually we know each other for a while he's been involved in the Blender community for ages even built the server or render farm for Cintel 12 years ago or so long yeah yeah really long ago and now you help Blender you are a Blender developer that doesn't inside a Blender but everything around that yeah that's a way of saying it yeah that's a way of saying it so I would not say that I'm a coder and I definitely aren't I'm dangerous if you you let me edit code so don't let me do edit code not good at that but I'm right now at the Blender studio they hired me despite this so that's that's that's an interesting part and I'm here to talk about that yes so if you ever downloaded Blender or downloaded from the build bot or downloaded the latest few releases or use the report a bag website the fabricator developer the blender adored then you have used the tools that aren't is maintaining so we're gonna go through some of them there is a big change actually happening soon ish in terms of that which we need gonna need your feedback so yes tell us a bit about it yeah so to be clear they hired me because not because I made or installed all these pieces of software but because these things need maintaining and there are some changes coming up and they want me to work on that and the main part of that is the infrastructure that we have called developer.blender.org some people might know it's it's the type of place where coders where developers go and look at source code look at which bug reports there are who's working on what are they fixed have the bugs being fixed etc ours is based on a piece of software originally written by by Facebook now called fabricator this website yeah the websites on the screen so you have a ability to to create a project to say okay what is this project about where's the source code of the project who is working on the project who can edit the source code blah blah and that's a great piece of software to be able to use but sadly Facebook pulled the plug somewhere last year which which means we'll have to start looking for something new we knew that Blender has known this for a while but yeah this is now becoming something that we really need to pick up and that's one of my one of my prime functions that I'll be be doing here and that's also where the call for participation and feedback is the most important yes are the alternatives what are all their open source software communities using communities so the equivalent of this is is github most people know that get lab is another project which is also available for download you can run it yourself in a reduced state and there's other projects like get the gogs but you were and the whole whole set of other names but get lab github are the ones that most people are going to be familiar with nowadays yeah the difference being that github is proprietary is by Microsoft and get lab is not it's open source there's an open source core available so if you're if you're gonna use it if you would like to use it in the same way that you can use it on gitlab.com you will have to pay yeah okay yeah so not entirely so what are the options and what is equal to action you want developers to help or community users are well one of the things that is important to know is like what are we using right right now fabricator has hundreds and hundreds of options and things that you can use to make your workflow easier and I've talked with a number of developers already to see okay when you get a bug or when you start doing something what do you do how do you go through the website what what functions do you use what do you depend on and which things are actually missing but I've had maybe 10 people where if which I've talked to in in debt developers yep mainly developers and they they have some good ideas and they they know what they they miss they know what they want but to yeah to to not to not miss things it would be nice if people who know like hey there is a feature which I've seen somewhere else and it would be great if we would have this available for blender that we know this when we're starting to evaluate which of the options out there is the best one to to use which might have the most amount of yeah features already working from start or if we if we ask people to work on something what are they going to work on do you already have a list of the most popular like off the top of your head yeah the the current shortlist so to speak is is GitLab which has been on on the shortlist for a long while people have mentioned it before like oh this is an obvious platform to look at we might qualify for an open source tier hosting that allows us to have like all the features of the commercial version because we're an open source project but we'd have to look at that and then there's the GTIA project which is looking very promising it's a very lightweight tool really really does a number of things really well right from the bat very quick very small and it's a it's a modern platform people are still working on that so that's nice but it might have a number of features which we would have to make ourselves or have somebody built for us and then there's another one which is kind of a dark horse right now I will not say it's a serious contender but it's it's not off the shortlist which is Pajur which is or Pagure yeah that's the one so as far as I can understand that one is a project managed maintained by Red Hat Fedora which they use internally seems to be active but there's not so much known about extra features so it doesn't seem to have like an application store where you can just install new pieces of functionality which which would be handy and the others seem to have so we're looking at it because it might have some things which it does really well compared to the others and then we also know like oh well this is something we could have had maybe we should consider that so these are three that were concentrating on based on yeah just basically going through the list of everything that's out there and saying well this has been not maintained for three years nobody uses this this is very specific or doesn't work for a general project and these three seem to come out as interesting choices nobody has forked fabricator nobody thought even imagine no it doesn't seem to be something that is on people's minds now might might be also because it's written in PHP oh it's very capable of what it does but it's it's really big yeah relatively big project the issue maybe with the GitLab being though that he has some parts are not completely GPL right and we cannot share them so you have to code it ourselves and then we in blender we everything we make we provide as open source yes that will clash a bit with what they have it depends on where what we go for there's two routes in general right now it looks like we can either take the open source version and then only use the open source features set which already is missing a couple of things that we know we will need we could add those things but then we're replicating features that are in a commercial product so then you kind of you you won't really be releasing it because you know you're just competing with it's nice yeah it's not nice it's not nice and also not use a useful in such a way yeah so that's that's a thing we're looking at like how would we do that and the other thing is that it looks clear that we could apply apply for a for the ultimate tier version based on the fact that they have an open source stimulation program I believe it's it normally costs 99 use the dollars but per user per month which for me yeah for us that would be insane but we would get it for free if we apply for it and we we would we would fit under all the requirements which we think we will but the question then is anything that we add anything that we make for ourselves that you know extends functionality we could release it at those as open source but nobody except paying customers would be able to use it so making nice it's not the it's not with it well nice it's a blender philosophy doesn't match with banners philosophy so that's a that's a conflict zone or that's a thing we're looking at like okay what would it mean yeah and yeah what what's the most important at this point I did a presentation three weeks ago now which touch touches it's an internal thing at the store yeah yeah which touched on a number of these things so to be clear the choice has not been made we're currently in a proof of concept stage where I'm setting up proof of concept for these three so that internally but also external developers will be able to look at like what does the blender project look like in these three options and then we can have an ups just observe like okay if you want to do this how would you go through the UI how do you tag this if if that works differently than a fabricator we'll need to we'll need to make things fit and some of these things are like round hole round shape some things are like square hole triangle piece so that's those things are I'm looking at yeah all right so that that's your call to action if you have any comments any feedback I'm gonna be following the comments on on this YouTube video but mainly where can people reach out for this is it a dev talk yeah so there there is already a topic on dev talk but I'll see if it's easily findable so I'll try to make sure that there's a nicely identifiable dev talk yeah and I link in the description yeah and if you want to reach me directly it's arnd at blender.org if it's a thing about fabricator suggestions or questions about you know where will this go or where are we let me know I'm also very interested in people who are doing things with fabricator that I wouldn't know about I've seen some people interfacing with fabricator and then they say hey aren't this is not working as it supposed to be I'm like who are you yeah what are you doing and why are you like why don't I know this yet so you know it's a big thing people are touching it from all sides and if you're touching it using it or would like to be using it and you have any questions come to me I'm also doing a number of other things at the studio infrastructure assistance and another exciting project that I'll probably come back about later yes and but experimental yeah it's this but also build both and maintaining well blender infrastructure in general and you just arrived at the studio now okay first task find a replacement for the car to learn the development yep that's a pressure number but there's a the time frame is yuring to like 2022 yes right hopefully yes it lasts longer than a year then we're doing something wrong but you know there's a lot of stuff going on in the studio and it might be a larger project than we think right now but the the goal is to have this done in in this year yeah no rash I don't think five decade or will stop working okay thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video thanks and Aaron for coming he actually works like two meters from here