usf-team team mailing list archive

[Edwin Marshall <aspidites@xxxxxxxxx>]

Funny enough, I read the bazaar advocating post before the git one back in the day.

A lack of code doesn't constitute a lack of contribution. If you contribute other ways that's great. In fact, I seem to recall you doing a lot with the wiki kizzo. As for code, a lack of commits from you shouldn't stop you from sharing wisdom of implementation methods. Though, I will say offering code does help raise creditability of the source of said wisdom.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: davidpkilgore@xxxxxxxxx
> Sent: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:26:48 -0700
> To: usf-team@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Usf-team] Project Status
> 
> Yeah I've been meaning to let the other devs know my most recent
> thoughts - please disregard my written-down future plans for USF.  I'm
> not contributing enough for my plans to really be considered (for
> now), and I also feel that my plans are something too far into the
> future anyway (I should worry about it later).
> 
> With regards to Git/Bzr, one way I would try to get someone to use
> something I like is to make it easy for others to use it.  So I
> suggest that you might want to clone the main USF branch over to
> GitHub, and be personably responsible for keeping it in sync with the
> (currently) main Bazaar branch.  I've been meaning to try Git, and
> I've heard good things about GitHub (I wish Launchpad was more social
> like that).  People may also want to check out
> http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ and
> http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-bazaar.html
> to get a better idea of the differences.
> 
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Edwin Marshall <aspidites@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> Tshirtman and I were in IRC discussing various aspects of the projects
>> current status, including goals, readiness, etc. While I did answer him
>> briefly, I think it would benefit the team as a whole if my opinions
>> were made more public.
>> 
>> We both agreed that the lack of momentum in development has nothing to
>> do with a lack of helping hands. In fact, for more than a year Tshirtman
>> has been developing this thing by himself, so common since would say
>> that development should be happening at a more rapid pace. After a bit
>> of thinking, I think I have narrowed the cause of this decrease in
>> productivity to a few things:
>> 
>> No Clear Goals
>> While we would all agree that network games, better characters, and a
>> more developed AI are design goals for a 1.0 release, there doesn't seem
>> to be any focus on any short-term goals. I am not proposing that there
>> should be strict deadlines (the lack of which I  believe is tshirtman's
>> way of not being imposing, and allowing us to have the freedom to deal
>> with the real world -- this is a hobby project after all), but I think
>> it would be great to have sensible goalds. For example - "It would be
>> nice to have a few concepts for network games thought up by the end of
>> this month". If we don't meet such flexible goals, then we should be
>> able to communicate as to why they weren't met, not excepting things
>> like "I don't have time". In fact, each members lack of time should be
>> communicated before hand so that realistic goals can be properly set.
>> 
>> No Ownership of Tasks
>> In a lot of commercial projects, this solved by a project leader
>> assigning tasks to different members. Clearly for our use case this is
>> unsatisfactory, but it does have the benefit of holding people
>> accountable, which generally ensures things get done. For our situation,
>> I think it would be great if we started taking advantage of our
>> blueprint tools. No one would be assigned to anything, but people could
>> volunteer to take ownership of a specific aspect. Another idea I had on
>> how we could begin to implement new features is a bit of a collaborative
>> model:
>> 
>> For the first week everyone submitted a draft implementation, which
>> could be pseudo code, a flow chart, or a few paragraphs explaining how
>> things would be implemented. After that, team members would comment on
>> which implementation was best (most intuitive, practical, less
>> performance impacting, etc). If the feature was a small feature, one
>> person (not neccessarily the person who came up with the implementation)
>> would finish it, otherwise, we could do some sort of pair programming.
>> 
>> Using BZR
>> Ok, this primarily a rant, but it does hold some truth in it. Either
>> way, you can probably skip this entire section and stop reading this
>> email :-).
>> 
>> Problems with using bzr are as follows:
>> 1. It is slow. Not only will it take longer for developers to get the
>> code and help contribute, but for source-based/bleeding-edge distros, it
>> means it will take that much longer to install and they may give up
>> before finishing the download.
>> 
>> 2. As a developer and a package maintainer it is cumbersome to test new
>> releases. When I try to use my package manager to install usf from bzr,
>> I get ssh/launchpad errors unless I disable my username in my bzr config
>> file. Afterwards, in order to continue to contribute to the project I
>> have to re-enable my user name
>> 
>> 3. It is not as widely accepted (except among Ubuntu users). People may
>> protest contributing code for the simple fact that they have to install
>> yet another distributed version control system. Also, as far as I know,
>> launchpad is the only web frontend to bzr.
>> 
>> 4. Branching/Tagging. In order to work on a different 'branch' of code,
>> I have to create a completely different repository, which is a waste of
>> precious hard drive space. With, for example, git, I can do everything
>> within the same directory.
>> 
>> 5. Merges. I won't even say anything else about this.
>> 
>> All these complaints being said, I do like the blueprints feature and
>> the idea of getting points for contributions. While using bzr is not
>> anything that will make me stop working on this cool game, I'll probably
>> compain about it on a bi-weekly basis as my level of frustration rises
>> :)
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> --
> Kizzo
> 
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