Freeciv maintainers, contributors and dev-list lurkers,
After talking with numerous people, reviewing old postings, thinking about the situation, and waiting for a convenient time, I would like to submit this proposal to the current freeciv maintainers as a first step to re-integrating the "unofficial" freeciv warclient project with freeciv proper. My goal is to find an agreeable balance where the freeciv project can gain from our (i.e. warclient project's) multiplayer-oriented feature base and extra programming help (certainly more c programmers, even if not top-notch, would help, no?), and we can gain from wider distribution of our codebase by being intergrated under the freeciv name. Thus I volunteer myself as the "liason" between our two projects; with your blessing I would become a freeciv maintainer with cvs write access to port warclient features, improve multiplayer related code, and generally provide my input as a member of the freeciv multiplayer community. Other warclient programmers, if porting something for freeciv proper, would first make their changes to our 2.1 (or later) branch, then I would check over and test the changes, post a patch and summary here, and finally commit it to the appropriate place in freeciv proper if there are no objections. In such a way, the warclient project would become a "multiplayer alpha-version freeciv". Later when our two projects (hopefully) converge more, and warclient programmers have become more skilled (we learn fast :)), they can choose to become freeciv contributors if they so choose. I hope we can agree that having this (compatible) fork of freeciv is not beneficial in the long run and that we all stand to gain if we learn to work together to produce a better project. Now I would like to bring up an issue that indeed has served to widen the gap between our two projects, namely the unfair treatement of contributors when trying to help this project in the past. Although he is certainly not the only one, Mr. William Allen Simpson has, as I have been told, put-off many people from wanting to contribute further to the freeciv project due to his excessive manner in dealing with them (please Mr. Simpson, if you would be so kind, read and consider the comments in this thread starting around this post http://freeciv.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?p=588#588). Surely most people are not as experienced or skilled as you are, so I grant you some height from which you may look down on people, but would it not be much better in the long run, if instead you, Mr. Simpson, helped them to improve so that in the future they may in turn help you with some tedious work that you yourself find loathsome? Certainly I have found that to be the case helping people contribute to the warclient project. Now I admit that I am not all-seeing and all-knowing so obviously I may have neglected to take into account some essential information somewhere, so I hope any of the involved parties will stand up to correct me. Wishing all the best for the freeciv project in the year to come, Madeline Book (a.k.a. book)
_______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev
