Hi, I thought it would be good to do a thread around the built in addons needing porting to Blender 2.8
Blender 2.79 was in ways the culmination of 10 years addons development all brought together for a final run. Many of the collections and useful working addons were put into Blender 2.8 to “sign off” on a long history and great series. If you look here: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.79/Add-ons you can see the extent of the work involved by many people.
Will all built in addons be updated to 2.8?
Without help, the short answer is no. It took years in some cases to add and port addons through to 2.79 series. Many of the collections I made (wrapping ui around multiple addons) took work from several people to get right. Many of the abandoned addons with no developer I took on with the help of Lijenstina and addons writers and helpers in irc chat. Much to the dismay of core devs who always asked “Who’s mainlining this?”
Without help from the addons community at large It’s likely that many addons will not make the grade for 2.8. They may come back at a later time or may simply be void in the new code base and environment. I remember some addons in 2.49 took years to make it into Blender 2.79 due to lack of developers and code changes.
Who can help here?
Any addons writers may help.
How to help?
First and foremost, look at the addons in Blender 2.8 and the addons within addons collections. Already I’m seeing addons that are in 2.8 broken and people are porting the original versions before 2.79, leading to multiple versions of addons with different code base. Lijenstina did lots of work making many addons suitable for 2.79 release with many fixes and upgrades.
What to do with an addon once you have ported an addon to 2.8?
You can let developers know by submitting a task here: https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/project/3/type/Patch/
You can drop into irc freenode #blenderpython for a chat. You are also welcome to ask questions there and real time chat about issues.
Thanks, It’s worth a mention List of addons that work with 2.8
Is a great resource. It seems like there’s plenty of people working on addons, just not enough working on built in ones.
Let’s try to move Blender built in addons forward. Once they get removed with no developer/maintainer, it could be another 10 years before they come back.