On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 12:33:14PM -0500, Guangcong Luo wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Stephen Swaney <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Personal ego is no justification for slowing down the
> > process.
> 
> Personal ego is a serious accusation, and to equate it with a desire
> not to fracture the community is dangerous. We all seek to do what is
> best for the users, and though we may disagree on the specifics, I
> thought we at least understood that premise.
> 
> You may disagree with whether or not it is worth delaying the releases
> in two platforms to ensure that all players have access to the same
> version and thus can easily play multiplayer with each other, but do
> not accuse me of ego for my belief that it is.
>
> -Zarel

Look, we all know you are a drama queen who thrives on being at
the center of manufactured controversy.  And this is not the first
time you have gone into a tailspin over imagined insults to your
beloved platform.  However, I am willing to concede this is not just
another reflex zarelesque objection to someone else's proposal.  But
you are still wrong for a whole slew of reasons.  Namely:

Resources

In an open source project, things get done when they get done.  It may
sound like a tautology, but it means someone has to do the work.  No
someone, no work.  OSX development resources are a bottleneck for our
project.  Other than imagined slights, there is no reason to constrain
ourselves based on our least-supported platform.

It is worth noting that a mac user on the forums has offered to step
up and do mac builds.  Woo woo! More resources for our project.  If we
can keep from driving them away.


Software development

We know historically that for software in general and WZ in particular
any new release has bugs. (see this morning's IRC discussion about
build and research problems with the newly added AA stuff if you need
an example).  The sooner in the development process we find these
bugs, the cheaper they are to fix.  Why wait to build all of our
platforms only to have to do it all over again right away?


Ecology

Certain organisms like 17 year cicadas and some bamboos emerge or
bloom synchronously in order to overwhelm predators with more food
than they can possibly eat.  This simply does not apply here.  The
more platforms we release for, the more happy (or disgruntled!) users
we have.  Waiting does not buy us anything.


Pragmatism

How about an appeal to The Greater Good?  Having some users play (and
test!) our software is better than having none.  Would you deny someone
the pleasure and joy of Warzone merely because someone else has to
wait a day or two for the same thrill?


Time scale

If you stand back and take a wider view, the latest WZ was released
the 1st week of September. (assuming we can get someone to do
OSX). Some of the packages may have been uploaded to the server before
others, but that does not imply we are marginalizing a particular
platform.  It merely reflects our available resources.


Bottom line:  We gain no advantage by waiting and have something to
gain by actually releasing some software.  Let's hitch up the wagons
and get on down the road!

-- 
Stephen Swaney                  
[email protected]


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