On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 09:46:47AM +0100, Dominique Dumont wrote: > Le Sunday 20 November 2011 00:41:40, Paul Wise a écrit : > > What happened to the idea of folding the SDL team into the games > > team? > > Nothing. I first heard of this idea several months ago and nothing > happened since.
Not strictly true. Fabian and I spent a few hours working on sdl-mixer, in particular: I got the package into git and started rebasing patches on top of a new upstream version; Fabian reviewed all the patches. I can't remember right now where that work is. I hope anyone who cares builds on top of our work and it isn't wasted. > This idea is good but has some drawbacks: > - packaging lib and packaging games is sometwhat different The games team already package libs. > - users of SDL libs may not be only games (*) I don't see the relevance here. What difference does the Maintainer: field make to users? > - Since Game packaging members are focused on games, SDL libs > packages are more likely to become victim of bystander apathy [1] Thoroughly disagree here. The games team is an active team with an existing infrastructure/set of conventions: active alioth team admins; mailing list conventions; tools and infrastructure to monitor bugs and perform QA checks; wiki pages etc. Creating a new team means doing all of the above again from scratch. It also means any contributor needs to put work in to subscribe to a new set of lists; request admin on a new project; learn a whole new set of conventions for VCS or whatever: a total pain. Whilst it's true that not all SDL users (in a packaging sense) are games, and not all games use SDL; certainly the vast majority in both direction do. And having the SDL packages maintained by an active team with the majority of participants having a vested interested in their well being, and giving SDL bugs more eyeballs is a great thing IMHO. I'd encourage anyone with the time and motivation to work on SDL to consider this avenue as I really believe it's the most sensible. > Let's say folding SDL team is plan B. Let's see first if plan A (SDL > team revival) is working. If you really feel that's the best way, I wish you the best of luck. > That said, Debian games team members are also welcome to join SDL > packaging team. Whilst I'm no longer in the games team, the burden/barrier of joining a new team and learning a whole new set of conventions on how to do stuff etc. as briefly detailed above is too high for me to bother, I'd rather put that energy into useful work. Thanks, -- Jon Dowland
