[Scummvm-devel] ScummVM 0.13.0 has been released. 0.13.1 plans

Eugene Sandulenko sev at scummvm.org
Sun Mar 1 10:05:35 CET 2009


Hi Team,

As you noticed by the announcement, 0.13.0 is out. It is a really good
release, and I am glad that also we are going with a quite high number
of ports ready.

However, with this release, unfortunately very early I see the need of
releasing 0.13.1. There are 2 important factors which make me so:

Ports.

PalmOS, NDS and PS2 ports are not ready. Although you see that GP2X
port is not available too, John will provide it soon without any source
changes.

I am lost in regard on what I can do in order to make all ports ready
at the release time. Sadly, last time when PalmOS and NDS ports were
made was exactly a /year/ ago. To me it looks like we'd better
announce that we need more volunteers working on these two.

PS2 is much better in that regard, as I see the work being done and I
am sure that Paul will finish this. Basically, this is mainly for his
sake, as I expect that he will finish his changes soon. The
improvements which are coming with 0.13.1 are tremendous.

OPIE port fell out of the earth, but that one was always somewhat
experimental.

Xbox port is one of a high demand, but its original author basically
has no time to finish it, so we are flooded with requests about
unofficial one. Although I can clearly understand it, as we will not be
able to distribute binary release anyway due to license restrictions.

Now on second reason:

Lack of testing.

Brief counting shows that at least 10 important games were not tested.
What is worse is that 5 engines were not tested at all! Two of them,
CinE and Parallaction had quite big number of changes since last
release, so we really do not know whether the games completable or not.

Our testing is based solely on our user base.

I had several discussion with LordHoto about that, the one who likes to
step in as the release manager. Johannes has a vision that releasing to
the public Release Candidate versions and make them available visibly
from the download page will somehow help this. Another his idea is to
make release just once a year.

I personally do not think that this will bring us any benefit besides
higher load on the porters and builders. Also sticking "RC" tag to some
of the releases will basically make them no different from ordinary
release, so it is trading a bad for worse. That is, we will
have same or bigger amount of release cycles, but number of "stable"
releases will decrease.

As of making releases once per year. I closely watch our downloads
page, and there is direct connection with frequency of our official
releases and number of downloads. My personal goal is to outreach June
2006 record of downloads when we had over 150,000. I believe that only
with DW freewaring we will be able to beat that.

Thus, releasing more rarely will decrease our popularity, releasing more
often is not possible as that is more load on the porters.

My own vision on improving this situation is this:

 - Introduce automated testing. If we will reach GSoC this year, that
   has to be the task #1.

 - Make our prerelease builds more visible on downloads page. Perhaps
   adding a temporary section on top of the page at the time of release
   with some explanations on stability of the pre- builds and giving
   direct links to them. I was really glad to see that several porters
   provided regular nightly builds at the testing period this time, so
   that section will definitely have much content.

Now I would like to hear your opinion.

Ah, 0.13.1 will be released once Neil and Paul finish their work on the
ports, no idea about Chris with his PalmOS port. Within a year there
was a single letter from him to scummvm-devel.

I believe that the timeframe for 0.13.1 is 1-2 months, that is, about
May at last. If some of the ports will not be ready at that time, it
will go as is.


Eugene




More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list