Re: Crossfire maintenance.

["Rupert G. Goldie" <rgg@aaii.oz.au>]

Mark Wedel spake thus:
>
>  I think any maintenance, and thus official releases, would be good.  People
> could still hack on their individual pieces (perhaps the maintainer would
> keep track of what each person is doing), without any problems.
> 

Yes this will certainly regenerate interest in the game.

>  However, with official releases, it would then mean that these changes
> would then get put in the master source, so other people could use them, as
> well as having moderately new versions to make diffs of.
> 
> [...problems of file sharing...]

>  I would be willing to become official maintener/patch collector of the
> source, as I have a bit of free time right now.  I can't promise doing a lot
> of hacking on it myself, but I would certainly put out new versions and
> apply patches I receive.
>

It would be great to have you become maintainer so that we have a central point
to send patches. I think having a maintainer will work better than having a 
shared source tree for the reasons you mentioned plus it allows you to control 
what goes into the game. That should help keep the source more stable than if
we let everyone apply patches willy-nilly to some master source.
 
>  One thing that should be done, no matter how becomes the official person,
> is to archive up the version Frank was working on.  Unless it is considered
> better to go back to the last official release as a baseline.
>

 The big change between 0.89.2 and the last 0.89.3 beta I saw was the 
introduction of filepaths. I think this is a good reason to go with the latest 
version. I think the first task should be to assemble a stable release based
on a recent 0.89.3 and to release it and the filepath-converted maps. Then
people can start creating more maps again and have a baseline upon which to
make patches.

 I can devote a bit of time to hacking code, and I'm willing to run the source
through Purify to try to track down any nasty/obscure bugs. It would also be 
nice if we could get a comment or stamp of approval from Frank as Crossfire is
his baby.

>    Mark Wedel
> master@rahul.net
>

Rupert
--
Rupert G. Goldie, Research Scientist                rgg@aaii.oz.au
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute        
/\/\|| 1 Grattan Street, Melbourne, Australia