Is anybody out there?

[Larry Gritz]

The Field3d repo has not had a single commit since March 11, 2020 (the era now officially known as "the before times"), when a handful of PRs were merged in rapid succession -- PRs that themselves had been languishing since 2016 and 2018. Prior to that brief March 2020 activity, there was not really anything else leading to the current master since 2016!

(There are also some activity from 2019 on a "dev-2.1" branch that was never tagged or merged into master and has not been added to since.)

I also looked at the history of this mail list, and nothing has been posted since March 2020, when a message (from me!) kicked off a little bit of activity that led to those PRs being merged and v1.7.3 being tagged. But prior to that March 2020 activity, there was ONE message from 2016, and then the next most recent activity was from 2015.


So, I hate to be indelicate here, but I'll just go ahead and ask:

* Is anybody using Field3D?

* Is anybody interested in maintaining it? (Note: It won't compile against the latest version of OpenEXR/Imath, and I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg of things that need fixing if anybody wants to haul it into the modern era.)

* Should we just mark it as an archive repo so nobody mistakes it for a living project?



--
Larry Gritz
l...@larrygritz.com

[Richard Shaw]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 11:45 PM Larry Gritz <l...@larrygritz.com> wrote:

* Is anybody interested in maintaining it? (Note: It won't compile against the latest version of OpenEXR/Imath, and I'm sure that's just the tip of the iceberg of things that need fixing if anybody wants to haul it into the modern era.)

You're right, I had forgotten with the myriad of packages I had to port to OpenEXR/Imath 3 but here's the link to the issue I submitted which has a link to my patch for Fedora:

https://github.com/imageworks/Field3D/issues/101

Thanks,

Richard 

[Richard Shaw]

And for posterity, OIIO is the ONLY consumer of Field3D in the Fedora ecosystem.

Thanks,

Richard

[Larry Gritz]

Oh dear, that makes it sound like I'm the one who has perpetuated this longer than necessary.

Also for posterity, at SPI (where Field3D originated), we recently have completely converted everything important to OpenVDB, our local build of OpenImageIO disables F3D, and our renderer has removed its code that reads it.

--

Larry Gritz

l...@larrygritz.com

[Richard Shaw]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 1:37 PM Larry Gritz <l...@larrygritz.com> wrote:

Oh dear, that makes it sound like I'm the one who has perpetuated this longer than necessary.

Also for posterity, at SPI (where Field3D originated), we recently have completely converted everything important to OpenVDB, our local build of OpenImageIO disables F3D, and our renderer has removed its code that reads it.

Good to know. So since I have it built with OpenEXR/Imath 3 we're okay for now. We can wait a few weeks and if there's no interest in pursuing development of Field3D I can remove it from OIIO in Fedora and retire the package.

Thanks,

Richard 

[Magnus Wrenninge]

Hi Larry & Richard,

I'm no longer at Pixar, but I believe they still use Field3D extensively. Even then, though, there hasn't been much new feature development. They're on a separate build system which is probably why we didn't really notice the drift in SCons and CMake.

I will definitely integrate the latest pull requests. Honestly, I don't think anyone uses Field3D through OIIO, so it seems reasonable to sever that dependency. But I don't think we need to move the project to "archived" state. There are still people who use it out there.

Best,

Magnus

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[Larry Gritz]

At SPI, we used Field3D through OIIO extensively (that's ultimately where OSL gets texels when shaders make texture3d() calls). But not too long ago, we finally switched the very last fx library elements that were in f3d to vdb, and now are building both OIIO and the renderer without f3d support.

I'd be curious to hear from somebody currently at Pixar to confirm whether or not they are still using it.

Archived doesn't stop people from using it, but it does send a strong signal to new people coming across it that it's no longer a maintained project that can expect any fixes or support. I think that's an accurate description of its current state, with literally years elapsing between merged PRs, mail list messages, or replies to filed issues, no CI system in place, and inability to build against the latest versions of its dependencies... unless somebody wants to step forward and commit to actually doing those things.

I don't have any personal or professional stake in either changing or maintaining its status, but I know it's not really alive in its current state. I'd prefer to see it revived, but I don't have the time or the need to do any of that work myself.

On Oct 24, 2021, at 10:05 AM, Magnus Wrenninge <magnus.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Larry & Richard,

I'm no longer at Pixar, but I believe they still use Field3D extensively. Even then, though, there hasn't been much new feature development. They're on a separate build system which is probably why we didn't really notice the drift in SCons and CMake.

I will definitely integrate the latest pull requests. Honestly, I don't think anyone uses Field3D through OIIO, so it seems reasonable to sever that dependency. But I don't think we need to move the project to "archived" state. There are still people who use it out there.

Best,

Magnus

On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 11:43 AM Richard Shaw <hobbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 1:37 PM Larry Gritz <l...@larrygritz.com> wrote:

Oh dear, that makes it sound like I'm the one who has perpetuated this longer than necessary.

Also for posterity, at SPI (where Field3D originated), we recently have completely converted everything important to OpenVDB, our local build of OpenImageIO disables F3D, and our renderer has removed its code that reads it.

Good to know. So since I have it built with OpenEXR/Imath 3 we're okay for now. We can wait a few weeks and if there's no interest in pursuing development of Field3D I can remove it from OIIO in Fedora and retire the package.

Thanks,

Richard 

--

Larry Gritz

l...@larrygritz.com

[Magnus Wrenninge]

Yeah, fair enough. I'll look into marking it as such.

Magnus

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