Re: [AD] Question about versions

[Thomas Fjellstrom <tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 25 August 2008, Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> > 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
>

I'll stop bitching now. I still think we need a slight bit more official (but 
not too stuffy) policy for this stuff though. Maybe a nice CONTRIBUTING file in 
the base dir with all of the "standard allegro way"s of doing things. I don't 
think the old "ahack" docs have been updated in quite a while, which we should 
probably think about doing, maybe start a version of it on the wiki, so we all 
can sort of collaborate on it more easily.

-- 
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx