On 12/23/06, Martin Spott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Still I agree with you that the process of creating Scenery - even
though the technical side is pretty nifty - has some drawbacks when it
comes to handling this process. I think there is some hen-and-egg
problem hiding here:
The software-toolchain that is called "TerraGear" features a
significant complexity and therefore Curt dislikes the idea of having
everyone modifying the source of it. So he's the only one who has the
ability to change things. I do understand Curt's attitude here. Nobody
wants to take responsibility for such a complex beast when you're at
risk of pouring numerous hours in bug fixing, just because some person
wasn't aware of the scope of his fix he added to the source base.
Everyone knows that Curt is a very busy man. Actually it takes you
several months and multiple reminders to convince him to apply even a
simple patch. As a result of this, those few people who _do_ have the
knowledge of how TerraGear-tools work (I'm not talking of myself here),
don't feel significantly motivated to improve the current state ....
Finally TerraGear mostly remains as it is.
To quote another recent poster ...
... the above statement above is not completely accurate, and not accurately
complete.
You do have some great sounding talking points though.
Many people have contributed to terragear over the years. You are right
that it is very complicated code and people in the past have proposed
patches without sufficient understanding of what they were changing. There
are exisiting bugs in the code that have come from well intentioned patches
that did make it into the code base ... things we are still trying to deal
with and resolve. So I do try to be very careful about changes. But many
people have indeed contributed patches or entirely new tools to the tool
chain.
Where do you think the vmap support came from? How about the code to do an
efficient TIN fit/simplification of the original gridded terrain data? I
suspect there may be a few specific developers that might not appreciate how
you trivially minimize their very important contributions to the core
terragear code base.
There have been some egregious cases of neglect -- especially this past year
-- where I have really dropped the ball on applying patches. I do have a
couple things in my inbox at the moment, but I'm going to need to take a
couple days off for the holidays here. But most of the time I'm able to
come up with reasonable turn around times for patch submissions.
I will reiterate that 2006 has been the worst year of my life in terms of
work stress and just being completely overwhelmed with everything on my
plate ... so your statements aren't completely without basis and you are
building on top of nuggets of truth, but I don't think they are a fair
charactarization of the overall situation either.
I'd propose to Curt to let at least few others work on TerraGear as
well without being required to ask for his blessing of every single
patch. I assume that such a move is suitable to motivate people at
least to put a little bit of effort in cleaning up the TerraGear source
- which might serve as a good start for further improvement.
I'm open to discussion here ... and I do believe that I'm not the only
developer that has write access to the TerraGear cvs repository.
Regards,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
http://www.flightgear.org
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