[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv 2.0 spec

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 04:59:11PM -0500, Andrew Sutton wrote:
> never mind... apparently my ideas about development processes are just plain  
> crazy. its odd. some people have said we need this, and then others have 
> turned around and said that its bad.
> 
> maybe somebody can explain the prejudice against process - however light - 
> and validate their claims.
> 

> if there's actually historic evidence, can somebody please point me to an 
> open source project that has failed utterly because the developers wanted to 
> take the time to think about the *next* version and write their ideas down? 

I want to answer with a question: which open source projects do you
know really have a design phase?

> there seems to be some concensus that having a requirement/design
> phase is so bad that anything written that way isn't good (enough? 
> raimar?)

If you develop a part of freeciv (not as a whole) you do a design. It
took me one year to come to the conclusion that the thing which I call
agent is _the_ solution (at least to the problem I was working on). I
implemented three things which I would now call prototypes (a
standalone gui-less civbot in C from scratch, a python civbot with XML
and an early agent using the GTK client). It would be nice if I had
come to this conclusion earlier. But we both know that this isn't
always possible.

As a whole it is the job of the maintainer to think about design. But
this works by accepting or rejecting patches. And by posting something
like "it would be nice to have xyz. I would be thankful if somebody
can work on this. Nevertheless I will put it on my todo list at place
312." So we know what shortcomings freeciv have.

So what is design? You see a problem, set a goal and thing about
solutions. You examine several solutions in your mind and than test
one or implement the best one. I think each freeciv developer does
this. You may not notice this because you only see the final patch. I
agree that it may be bad the author isn't forced to write his
motivations/goal down. 

Why is there almost no design discussion on freeciv-dev? Two reasons:

 1) it is very hard to find people which work on the same part of
 freeciv (the people working on gotohand are an exception here)

 2) you don't see the other people face to face, e.g. the conversation
 isn't very interactiv. This is a problem. I would really like to show
 some of ideas I have on a board and get a discussion going. I would
 really like to have a monthly freeciv meeting to design/set the
 direction but this is unlikely to happen.

So you see this is a different settings here.

        Raimar

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