[Freeciv-Dev] Re: freeciv 2.0 spec

[Andrew Sutton <ansutton@xxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 04 December 2001 03:29 am, Raimar Falke wrote:
> I want to answer with a question: which open source projects do you
> know really have a design phase?

MICO (MICO is CORBA) had a design. it's doing pretty well.

>
> > 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.

that sounds about right, but why wouldn't there be an architectural design. 
something says how everything fits together? a blueprint. you're right 
though, design/prototype is how things are done. i'm not suggesting that 
everybody give up writing code alltogether.

> 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.

and it still would be, except with a documented architecture and highly 
extensible system, it would hopefully be much easier to tick off the "we 
need..." entries in the todo list.

> 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.

that's all i'm asking for. except complete rationalization for the server 
framework.

>  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)

that's the same for corporate development too. i've always gone to great 
lengths to avoid working on the same stuff as people on my team. it's a pain 
to sync changes to the same code.

>  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.

i work from my apartment 300 miles away from my company so i don't really see 
my team members face to face that often. when i do, there usually isn't too 
much design discussion. it's usually, can't get this to work, can't get that 
to work. ugh. a monthly meeting would be nice. what about irc?

andy