[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Documentation, Usability and Development

[Ben Webb <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Kevin Brown wrote:
> 
> > But this is completely useless unless the changes eventually make it
> > into the stable branch!  And the AC people are proof that this doesn't
> > happen right now.  It's A LOT more work to maintain multiple feature
> 
> Ah... but were those changes stable enough to be added to the stable
> branch in the first place?

        Hard to say, since none of the submitted patches were ever 
(apparently) tested. One of the patches only touched (IIRC) five lines of 
code, however, so I'm pretty sure it didn't drastically alter the 
stability.

> Its a very, very bad idea to keep adding features to a product without 
> any quality control.

        That's never what we "AC people" wanted to do. We wanted to add 
experimental features, develop them, and hopefully see them added to the 
main project in the fullness of time. Since patches provoked no discussion 
on freeciv-dev, we set up FreecivAC in order to free ourselves from having 
to constantly update our patches (some of which are more than a year old 
now) to match Freeciv, and so that we could trot out a URL on the numerous 
occasions when somebody says "is anybody working on [x] ?"

        None of our patches (with the possible exception of the borders 
patch, which has been subject to a few differences of opinion) was 
rejected for "quality". Patches were rejected for being too big, 
containing too many comments and blank lines (!) or being unnecessary. 
Others were just ignored. One patch (generalised improvements) was ignored 
until a developer with CVS write access decided he liked the look of it, 
and (apparently) committed part of it without any serious testing. I'm not 
overly upset about any of that - after all, I don't test the majority of 
patches others send in either - but just don't think this is the way to 
go. If you put a patch into CVS and it breaks something, a dozen people 
will complain immediately. At least one or two will supply a patch to fix 
it, or else they'll recommend that the patch be backed out. Otherwise, the 
patches are left to linger on freeciv-dev or jitterbug, and work ends up 
being duplicated (e.g. the sound patches).

        Ben
-- 
ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx           http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/~ben/
"'In a sense,' he said, 'you're alone here, so if jump you best jump far'"