Natron development status?

There is no news about this, but little help is a great help.
For example,

  • I try filling gaps in documentation (I need it once a lecturer :)), feel free
  • I learn Natron code, mostly gui code, I worked a lot on QT-based projects, I’m not an experienced programmer, but I can make minor changes on UI / UX side or re-design things, feel free
  • use Natron on your project, write feedbacks
  • grow the community / user base, spread Natron
  • drop a message to your programmer buddy :slight_smile:
    and more
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I already provided an answer about this here: Crowdfunding Natron 3d Workspace - #61 by Jon_Bragado

In short Ton Roosendaal (the founder of Blender) himself hasn’t indicated that the Blender Foundation will directly help Natron (or indeed any other software)

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That is what I thought. Thanks for the link: I couldn’t find it for Jon.

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Did you finish writing your blog on the same topic? If not, please be sure to post the link here when its done.

Mostly yes. I have written it but it sounded a bit too alienating. If it’s ok with you I’ll PM you with my draft.

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Got this link through twitter: “Attract existing FLOSS software projects to KDE and incorporate their members into our community” ⚓ T12801 Attract existing FLOSS software projects to KDE and incorporate their members into our community: Convince Design/Creativity Applications to join KDE

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That sounds promising but how will it go through? Also, what does that mean for the future of the existing Natron Community? We have this forum, a Facebook group managed by Omar (@Blackvfx2018) and Thomas and the Discord Server managed by me.

Who among the Natron leadership could represent Natron and communicate with KDE representatives? I think this opportunity id worth exploring. Though Natron does not have much to offer in terms of developers coming with it((

This is mostly about integration/infrastructure, the community is independent if this (look at Krita).

That would be @devernay or myself.

There are many pros and cons regarding this. But as you say could be worth exploring …

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I think @hellozee is here, and perhaps they coul d answer and questions you might have about joining KDE. They are a Krita Dev.

I have already poked @rodlie over twitter about that. KDE would love to incubate Natron, :wink:.

https://phabricator.kde.org/T12801

Though moving to KDE might be a bit problem in this situation. Considering KDE uses a self hosted GitLab instance for hosting the git repos & code review and bugzilla for bug tracking, not GitHub. And the official mode of communication is Matrix, though the channels are bridged with IRC and sometimes even Telegram. On the other hand we have folks who could take care of promotion, system administration, translations and most likely even some developers, :smile:

I am also one of the web devs for digiKam. Most of the KDE stuff is nice… but bugzilla is a disaster.

In general (KDE) GitLab is ok, but we might get less contributions since it’s more complicated to submit a pull request compared to GitHub(?). The use of Jenkins is nice, we have already used that in the past, so that should not be an issue. Regarding bug tracking, Bugzilla is not something I would prefer to use (I also don’t think the users would prefer to use it).

Submitting a pull request or in case of GitLab, a merge request is pretty similar but ymmv. I have seen Kdenlive folks using the Gitlab issues for internal bug tracking, I guess someone could talk to Ben or any sys admin to use that instead I guess.

Ohh, we are going to have a new identity system similar to the blender one and if everything goes okay, we might get the blender funding platform running for Krita, :smile:

Also, there are plans to move the phpbb forums to Discourse, afaik.

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Okay that sounds great then. :slight_smile:

I don’t think we need to change what’s already working (github + pixls.us + fb + discord). What we really need is developpers who jump in.

There have been something like 2 or 3 external contributions to the code during the past year. That’s a good start, but we’re still far from having regular maintainers.

And Natron is not only a (open) source project, but we also have many users who cannot even compile a software, so we have to distribute binaries, which actually took most of our maintainer time during the past year.

True that.

Isn’t every user facing open source project like that? I can bet most of Krita users do not even know what Linux is. Being a KDE project helps us to focus just on to writing good code. There are sysadmins, web masters, promo folks who take care of the other tasks. Even for things like GSoC/Season of KDE we have designated folks who manage that, :smile:.

And of course how can I not talk about our yearly sprints which are sponsored by KDE allowing us to meet in person and talk about our favorite software, :wink:

Most of our time on Natron is spent maintaining the build system, I don’t see how KDE can “fix” this. We still need to update, patch and test third-party dependencies for three platforms, this is a full time job.