A small moan

[Roboko]

I just wanted to voice some frustration, I hope this is the right place to talk about this.

I installed the new Blender 2.8 today, unaware of the scale of changes to the application.

I’m really thrilled to see that so much work has gone into improving the Blender Interface, however, I am also feeling frustrated by the versioning and installer, which caused a major inconvenience.

You see, usually product versions, go major.minor, so I was expecting 2.8 to be an incremental update, as only the minor number was updated. I didn’t expect it to break all of my plugins, completely change the interface, and all my settings etc.

Blender 2.8 is clearly a complete major overhaul, so it should have been called version 3.0, so I would have known to check compatibility, the installer really ought to have prompted me that all of my plugins are going to stop working, or better yet, when the MSI was built, it should have been given a different product code so it wouldn’t overwrite 2.79. Because Blender did not stick to versioning conventions, and the installer automatically deleted my copy of 2.79 I am now forced to re-download 2.79, and 2.8, as zip files, rendering the installers useless.

200mb is probably not a lot to you developers in the states with fast internet connections, but for me this takes a long time, and cost me a day of work. It’s not the end of the world, but I just want to point out that this could really have been handled better.

Thank you for your work regardless

Roboko

[kabu]

@Roboko

Blender 2.8 is clearly a complete major overhaul, so it should have been called version 3.0,

Absolutely agree. And that would’ve marked more clearly the change, even in a marketing sense. Like win8 - win10.

[ostapblender (Bohdan Lvov)]

@Roboko

Blender 2.8 is clearly a complete major overhaul, so it should have been called version 3.0,

Ton explained it in the recent interview: https://youtu.be/qQZ9fXpXdtI?t=2975

Long story short: 2.8 six years ago meant to be a “feasible” release, but they’ve got carried away with changes a bit, so in the end it seemed like a cheat to SUDDENLY rename 2.8 to 3.0

[Safetyman]

Instead of installing and risk losing all your work, why not unzip and run the portable version so that you can use older releases at the same time while you get up to speed?

[zanzio]

Ugh…, This argument again. We’ve had this discussion already in this tread:

The most annoying thing about Blender 2.80

The most annoying thing I find about Blender 2.80 is that people keep referring to it as Blender 2.8. It’s Two dot Eighty, not Two dot Eight. There is a difference of 72 version numbers between the two. Two dot eight would have been in the early 2000s (Ref: https://download.blender.org/release/) but was never released as a downloadable version. It just seems weird when people talk about moving from Blender 2.79 to 2.8. The way software versions usually work is that each number separated by a …

and before that in this thread:

Why Is This Blender 2.8?

So this might seem a bit arbitrary, but I can’t help but wonder why Blender’s version numbers rise so slowly. Blender 2.8 is clearly an enormous revamp which should and is generate as much buzz as possible, and it creeps up from 2.79 to 2.8 like a minor bugfix in other software versioning. Does this matter? Well, it’s a psychology thing. You want to emphasise the significance of a step and this gradualism rather does the opposite, positively downplaying it. So I’m interested in why the versioni…

and a bunch of other times before that in yet more theads that I don’t feel like looking up. This is one of those areas where blender has chosen its own way to go about things. I personally prefer a naming scheme that refers to each release by the year and month it came out on rather than any numbers based names, but either way I don’t think it matters too much in the end.

In your case, I think the best solution is to do as safetyman suggested and download the zip version for each release first.

Edit:No wait, I take that back. Your best option would probably be to copy the contents of the current version before updating, then add a folder named config under its “version” folder (In this case the folder is named “2.79”). This will make the copy of the current version portable, and you will always have that version as a backup in case there are issues with the new version.

They don’t wait until any sort of “major” release to do things like update which version of python blender uses, so addons do at times need to be updated in order to work for an incremental release.

[Harley]

I have mixed feelings about this moan. The version complaint is silly as the experience would have been the same had it been “2.81”, “3.0”, or “Seattle”.

But we should be installing in such a way that allows multiple versions. So into something like “…/Blender/2.81/” instead. Yes, we make zips available but that does not excuse our installers overwriting older versions.

[Piotr_Adamowicz]

Blender has an installer?

[mib2berlin]

Hi, if you want download for Windows you get the installer, you have to choice .zip manually. I think this is new and not a good move.

Cheers, mib

[pixelgrip]

whats the problem? 2.79 is the last version without eevee ect, that you get only with 2.8 (or 2.80) version and higher in the future.easy enough.

[apoclypse]

@zanzio

I personally prefer a naming scheme that refers to each release by the year and month it came out on

Hey I like this idea. Get rid of version numbers altogether. Just use the year and month it came out. Kind of like Windows with Windows 10 1803 or Ubuntu with their version numbers.

[pixelgrip]

@apoclypse

I personally prefer a naming scheme that refers to each release by the year and month it came out on

Hey I like this idea. Get rid of version numbers altogether. Just use the year and month it came out. Kind of like Windows with Windows 10 1803 or Ubuntu with their version numbers.

you have install date even the install time,the hash,and if you use the branch and the blender version.
if thats not enough,i dont know.

[zanzio]

I wasn’t saying that we need to switch to that format. I was saying that if we were to switch to another naming scheme, then I would personally prefer one where the version is the year and month.

[anon27868450]

Although a lot of work has been done … the real motivation is that you are not yet ready for a 3.0 version, there is a lot of work to do.

blender is not “a classic commercial product”
The steps ahead represent real goals in maturity and in evolutionary features.
So in this sense, 2.80 is using a metaphor,
“a first step on the moon … but from here to building bases and trying to do earth-forming it takes a lot more time and work to do.”