Re: [AD] Question about versions

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> There is a reason I've been quite insistent. Before I started  
> getting in
> everyone's faces, things were stalled. Even bug fixes were rare.  
> After everyone
> agreed to the dev meetings, that while didn't completely live up to my
> expectations, did manage to get the ball rolling again :)

A similar thing happened a few years ago when Eric announced that he  
didn't have enough time anymore to keep working on Allegro. Elias and  
I started to commit pending bug fixes and feature additions and doing  
some more work of our own and then more people joined in and started  
helping as well - we got a WIP out and finally 4.2.
It was something that for me was amazing to see.

> Probably a chicken and the egg problem, if no one shows interest,  
> or does
> anything, no one shows interest or does anything.

Yes, I think this is the thing.

> My point would be, given he did come along earlier and has commit  
> access, it
> would have been ideal if he just did the work on allegro svn  
> itself. More out
> in the open.

Well, yes, I do think that would have been better (which is why I  
asked why he didn't use Allegro's SVN system) and I think it makes  
sense to do that unless there's a good reason not to. Either way,  
there's no point in crying over spilled milk and in the end it's the  
end result that matters.

> I don't really have a problem with including the port, but given  
> discussions
> we had about slimming allegro down, and removing stuff with few  
> users, this
> sort of goes against it all.

My understanding is that that's more about features than anything  
else. When it comes to ports I think the policy has always been that  
if someone want to contribute a working port (and ideally maintain  
it) then they're fine to do so.
If someone wants to take the trouble of porting Allegro 5 to DOS, let  
them. I don't really see the point myself and I don't see any of the  
main developers doing it (the main development focus should be Linux/ 
OS X/Windows anyway).

> It doesn't happen too often. Maybe I should complain more? ;) I see  
> patches
> come in with the ALLEGRO ASCII art mangled, white space changes,  
> and other
> usually editor caused errors totally missed.

Those definately shouldn't be in there and it doesn't hurt to  
complain about those. There's also no problem in reminding people to  
look at the diff before hitting commit (to catch this sort of thing).

Evert