Re: [Freeciv-Dev] capability and ruleset.

[David Pfitzner <dwp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nicolas Brunel wrote:

>     there is a very active developpment around modpacks these days ! :)
> It looks like with Sune patches ruleset will have to be changed.
> As it takes a long time for freeciv to spread all over the world, the best
> is to keep version compatible for as long as possible.

Personally, I think backwards compatibility, while desirable,
should not unduly hold back development of new stuff.

>    The idea is to count the number of new fields which have been modified.

You mean if the rules have not really changed, then allow old
clients.  That does seem attractive, since most of the time
people will just use the default rules.  However it also seems 
to me somewhat complicated to implement.  

(Eg, you have to keep around a set of the old defaults to check 
against the ruleset defaults, and then if the new defaults are 
changed in any way, you lose compatibility anyway.  And you might 
not know at connection time which rulesets are used, so a player
joins the game and then gets kicked out when the game starts...
And if the unit type struct changes, its harder to check whether
anything has really changed.)

My preference would be to have a 1.8.1 release soon (first stable 
GTK+ version), still compatible with 1.8.0, (with a minor foodbox 
rules incompatibility to be addressed...) and then allow the next 
version (1.8.2/1.9.0?) to be incompatible ("+" capabilities), with 
widespread changes to units, governments, buildings, and anything 
else people want to do. 

Regards,
-- David