[crossfire] Leaderships(s?) (was Re: Platform statement)

[Lalo Martins]

quoth Kevin R. Bulgrien as of Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:56:05 -0600:

> I have not enough SVN access to do a release.  It feels like after all
> this time waiting without help to get my client work out its only
> natural to not flip out over someone else' urgency of the day, but, I
> was ready for a release a long time ago... no point in wondering what I
> am willing to do.  I've probably made that quite clear to anyone who
> felt inclined to notice. That said, I have a real life, kids, high
> urgency project that is running over two years old now and ready to pop
> in a month or so... Not a lot of leftover bandwidth for thinking CF with
> that going on, and I suspect I'm not alone there.  I'll be glad to crank
> up the scripts and chunk something out.

You have commit access.  That's enough access :-) if you want to do this, 
what I'd expect you to do is decide what will go in the release, and 
merge anything that needs to be merged.  (If you just decree that your 
client release == trunk, then your work is done.)

If you *do* have time you want to spend on it, then any amount of 
building, testing, and fixing bugs is welcome.  If something happens to 
draw you away, I'll handle it, or someone else will, or we'll be late.

If I feel adventurous and work allows me, I may try to set up the windows 
build environment, and see if I can convince gtkv2+glade to compile.  But 
from what I heard of people who did try, probably not ;-)

Of course, once the alphas/betas are out and bug reports start popping 
in, someone has to fix them before we dare make a "final" release.  Since 
not many people are actively doing client development, I'd say there's 
about a 35% chance that someone would be you anyway; but if real life 
keeps you away from doing it, or even makes us miss the target date?  It 
doesn't matter at all.  What matters is that a release eventually 
happens, and that it's the best quality we can do.

I do believe regular releases on a fixed timeline are a good thing.  
However, I'm not expecting *this* release to be the first of those.  We 
have a lot of accumulated work to catch up to, and we have to figure out 
our own workflow, so that will take some time.  Better do it well than 
fast.  Then the next one can be on time.

The other good thing about volunteering to lead the client are that, 
well, you get to make decisions.  Want to drop the x11 client?  The gtkv1 
client?  Go ahead.  Change the whole thing to C++, or, I don't know, 
Erlang?  It's your baby.  The last few decisions you did make (glade, 
layouts, themes) have been successes so far, so I don't think there's any 
reasonable justification for objecting to you making future ones.

I suppose, in the interest of fairness, I should say that I've been half-
secretly writing a "libcfclient" in C++, using boost and asio.  I have no 
intention of rewriting the desktop client using this lib, or of competing 
with it, though; the lib was meant for other things, including bots and 
maybe portable (phone/pda/pmp/ds/psp) clients.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
                  http://lalomartins.info/
GNU: never give up freedom              http://www.gnu.org/