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

[vze2zq63@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Raimar Falke wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 07:20:17PM -0800, Kevin Brown wrote:

<snip: FreeCiv's development model>


> > More importantly, why are we still discussing this?  :-)  We had this
> > very same discussion a number of months ago, and I'm sure that
> > discussion wasn't the first of its kind either!
> What was the outcome of the last one?

As I recall, everyone (or at least everyone who expressed an opinion, 
which may or may not have included the maintainers) was in favor of a 
more open development model.  I believe the idea was to recruit a few 
more maintainers - but this never happened (AFAIK).

I will again suggest what I suggested then: the current CVS tree can 
become the "development" tree.  CVS branches can be used judiciously to 
fork off "stable" trees - for instance, rather than go into a "freeze" 
before a release, just make a "stable" branch which is frozen (except 
for bugfixes), and make beta releases from this branch to get feedback. 
 The branch can stick around after the release, so that further 
bugfixes can make it in and a new (small) release can easily be made 
that includes them (of course, this could really screw up the version 
numbers).
Essential to this process is that the development branch is opened up 
more - more maintainers are needed.  Right now the manpower is unequally 
distributed, so that many more patches are being made than the 
maintainers can handle (I realize this is because several of the 
maintainers are currently busy elsewhere, but that really doesn't change 
the issue).  The current lag time between patch submission and patch 
acceptance is so long that any decent-length project (like the general 
topologies change, or the AI rewrite) may take longer than a release 
cycle, or longer than the author(s) are willing to spend on it.  I think 
you'll find that if the lag time drops, more patches will be submitted 
and some of the estranged patch-writers can be brought back into the fold.

One alternative is to create a separate CVS tree to become the 
"development" tree.  More maintainers would be granted access to this 
tree, and patches would be accepted with a much lower lag time.  But I 
think this would lead to the development tree quickly becoming more 
stable _and_ feature-rich than the stable tree, which could easily 
result in a complete fork of the project (unless the development tree 
completely replaces the stable tree and we start over, which is very 
unlikely IMO).
jason