[Scummvm-devel] What is happening to the ScummVM team?

[Johannes Schickel]

Hello fellow team members and people interested in ScummVM development,

the latest development on ScummVM is making me wonder about various 
things. In 2008 and what passed yet of 2009, we had three releases and 
added various engines to our project. That is a quite pleasant fact at 
first glance. Looking in depth what happened in that time, is not really 
pleasant for a person interested ScummVM development.

First of all I want to take a look at our releases. Everyone who 
remembers the 0.11.0 release, might be able to remember some problems we 
had with that one:

- ITE was not completable. And it was only noticed after release, 
because of missing testing results.
- Our Common::File::exist had an ugly bug on some platforms leading to 
ITE not being startable on those.

This lead us to release a 0.11.1 shortly after, to squash those ugly 
problems.

With 0.12.0 we had again some ugly problem with ITE. If I remember 
correctly it lead to being it again being not completable with this 
release. So far we didn't have any release after that, thus forcing 
users to use a potentially even more bugged development version OR to 
use an older release like 0.11.1.

Now we are nearing our next release: 0.13.0. Seeing this time we know 
already that MM v2 is not completable and some games are again not even 
tested, this includes ITE. Tagging is also near, to be precise in 6 
days. Everyone following -devel also notices there had been silence 
about release talk since some days.

This leads me to the question: Do we learn anything from our experience 
with past released? Actually I am surprised we so far do not have set 
the bugs preventing MM v2 from being completable as release critical 
bugs. Another thing is, seeing how many games have still not been 
tested, that I would personally propose to delay our release a bit to 
get more testing results to sort out possibly other games not being 
completable.

Of course we now have a special date for ports to create prerelease 
binaries. That is a step in the right direction. I am currently not sure 
in how far our ports adapted that though.

I also know some might say, "but we should really have a release soon" 
or "we always release every 6 months", but in my opinion we should 
rather have a quality release than a release in a fixed period, which 
has too many annoying bugs. Thus my vote for this release is: wait for 
more testing results! (means delay it)

I'm happy to hear any comments from you about it, might it be: "just 
bullshit, our release testing is great, just test the games yourself" or 
"we might really want to think again about it". I would not be happy to 
hear the usual silence, though. Also please note ITE was purely taken as 
an example here, which sadly had some problems in the last releases.


The next point I wanted to talk about is our engine additions. Although 
it is nice that we had so many new engines and supported games in the 
last year, I am wondering about how engine additions were handled 
though. Generally there had been mostly silence about new engines, until 
they were added or it was sure they would be added. I think that is a 
quite dis-pleasant fact. I would have really loved to hear more about 
what is going on with ScummVM development. And by that I do not mean 
just some people talking in IRC about new engines and such. After all 
nowadays we have planet.scummvm.org where people, who develop an engine 
for ScummVM, can get their blog listed to allow people to check news 
about engine development. And last but not least we still have this 
mailing list to discuss engine additions and other major additions / 
changes to ScummVM. I wondering why we did not take really use of this?

 From what I know for Groovie we had an ongoing discussion about whether 
the engine should be added or not. For MADE / M4 we only had a mail the 
day after the commit, so everything was decided and done by then, which 
is in my opinion a bad practice in an free software project.

An example of my understanding of how to do it is the mail 
"[Scummvm-devel] A new engine: Interspective" from 17.09.2008. It 
informs you about development for an new engine, gives you an link to 
check out the source, and gives some information about the engine. Of 
course we didn't add that engine yet, but it is at least a nice way to 
inform about things which could be merged in the future.


Now another issue I came across today in our IRC channel by chance: 
FreeSCI merge. It seems that the FreeSCI team is preparing for an merge 
into ScummVM. I am pretty astonished that so far nobody of our team 
members involved in the FreeSCI discussion about this and/or planning 
the merge together with them had said any word about it. Actually I 
thought our policy was to post mails to -devel to discuss such changes.

 From what I get out of the freesci logs these lines particularly 
confuse me:

"14:34:55 waltervn  Maybe Max is right and we should just merge it in."
and
"16:41:55 _sev  creichen: so, as we talked, this week we are going to 
import current freesci sources into ScummVM svn"
from 
http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/creichen/freesci-logs/2009.02/log20090209.html

"09:45:42 waltervn  hey _sev, any progress with the import?"
and
"13:06:52 _sev  waltervn: yes, I get it almost ready"
from 
http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/creichen/freesci-logs/2009.02/log20090212.html

"[23:00] <syke> how's the import of the freesci darcs going? is there 
anything I can do to help?"
from http://logs.scummvm.org/log.php?log=scummvm.log.12Feb2009

I really wonder why nobody said any word about an actual FreeSCI merge 
now. So far Max often complained about missing  communication in our 
team. Now I wonder: Why was there no discussion about such major 
changes? I was not able to find a single reference to it on our -devel list.

Actually the last thread about SCI on our mailing list was: 
"[Scummvm-devel] SCI engine development -- call for developers" from sev 
on 20.12.2008. It talked about another SCI interpreter. On the bottom it 
talked about merging the GSoC task into FreeSCI. Seeing the quotes above 
it really looks like we now merge FreeSCI into ScummVM.

Not that I am against a FreeSCI merge, but I do not consider it nice 
that there is no word about such major changes to ScummVM.

Because of all the aforementioned I have the following questions:

* Why was there no word about FreeSCI merge on this mailing list? Is 
there anything to hide?

* Are we still one team? Or is it nowadays rather that "the ScummVM 
team" as an umbrella team and various single engine teams?

I am happy to hear and discuss any comments / answers.

// Johannes

PS: One could think of splitting the mail up for discussion, but I think 
all different topics belongs together.