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

Johannes Schickel lordhoto at gmail.com
Fri Feb 13 03:59:13 CET 2009


Max Horn schrieb:
> now to the second point you address: Communications, how decisions are 
> made in this project, in particular regarding engine additions and (to 
> lesser degree) whether to merge FreeSCI.
>
> Let me start at the end, with FreeSCI, and somewhat independantly of 
> the major points you raise. Mainly because as I understand it, your 
> mail is not about being opposed to merging FreeSCI, but rather 
> addresses meta-issues (valid ones, too), so I'd like to clarify the 
> details on that before turning to the higher level.

Yeah the FreeSCI merge was now mainly the reason I wrote the mail to 
-devel, I was not really happy with the situation before either.

> Yes, there have been very active talks with the FreeSCI guys on 
> whether (or rather: how and when) to turn FreeSCI into a ScummVM 
> engine. All of this can be read in 
> <http://www-plan.cs.colorado.edu/reichenb/freesci-logs/> and in the 
> mail archives of their mailing list 
> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/freesci-develop/>. This contains 
> more or less all the information (at least all that I know off - I 
> made sure to discuss things only in logged places most of the time). 
> Granted, this is not very visible for the ScummVM team, but at least 
> you can still read up on it.

I heard that "you can read up on it in the logs" argument some times now 
and I am actually not really fine with it :-). Especially since most of 
it (everything?) happened in the FreeSCI logs, which I usually do not check.

> Strictly speaking, the whole merge thing is nothing new, but rather 
> more or less an extension of the GSoC 2008 project, and Jordi's 
> well-known (I think?) work on making FreeSCI more "ScummVM compatible" 
> (the GSoC project built on that).

No it is nothing new, but since Eugene's last mail talks only about 
merging the GSoC code into FreeSCI, I was a bit surprised that shortly 
after it seems we now want to merge FreeSCI into ScummVM. Especially 
then nothing was said about it.

> All in all, I think FreeSCI would be a great addition to ScummVM, and 
> IMNSHO one that fits much better into ScummVM's original spirit than 
> some of the other more recent engine additions ;-). I personally see 
> no reason not to add it, as long as the original developers are OK 
> with it and actively participate, which right now seems to be the 
> case. Well, if they ever manage to get around finishing that cleanup 
> they first wanted to make, right now it seems to be back to sloooow 
> mode with them.... ;-).

Actually I would also require all of them to subscribe to this 
development list and at least write some introduction. Of course it 
would be nice when they would actively take part in possible discussions 
on this list ;-). Apart I am not against a FreeSCI merge myself, as 
stated above. I am actually quite interested in KQ7 support, but I guess 
that is nothing for the near future... :-)

> You wrote:
>> * Why was there no word about FreeSCI merge on this mailing list? Is 
>> there anything to hide?
>
> From my point of view, there is nothing to hide. I think the main 
> reason scummvm-devel has not been informed is that nobody thought 
> about doing it. Yup, that's not good! It's bad, in fact. Just as it 
> was bad to not announce the gog.com changes before hand, and I guess 
> the MADE/M4 merge was handled. And I am sure there are more examples, too.

I totally agree with the fact, that it is bad :-).

> I can only speak for me personally, of course: I am not happy about 
> this. In the case of FreeSCI, I certainly am one of those to blame for 
> not talking to scummvm-devel. Truth is, it never occurred to me to 
> email scummvm-devel. Bad. No excuse for it, either.

Hehe :-).

> Part of this is because I myself have little spare time (having a 
> "real" job these days, even though it's "only" at the uni). I get so 
> many mails behind the scenes that want to be taken off, so many bugs 
> that pop up, so many porters and engine authors that need to 
> propped...  I am tired of this. One thing I just have decided to try 
> to improve the situation. From now one, I will send all the email I 
> send to prod people or to handle issues that are not confidential, to 
> scummvm-devel with CC. All. Including those "hey I sent you a trivial 
> fix for a bug in your port 4 weeks ago, could you at least ack it?" 
> mails. By doing that with all mails, I don't have to decide for a mail 
> whether to do it, and maybe this will help a bit with comm.

I wonder why people do not use this mailing list and/or the bug tracker 
to ask about bugs / problems, but rather instead seem to mail people 
personally.


>> * 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 not sure. I don't quite know what the difference between the two 
> is, either... We always have been a loosely grouped bunch. There are a 
> handful people who care about general stuff in ScummVM. The majority, 
> though is happy to work on their engine and/or port, and seems to 
> little care about anything else. Going so far that over the years, I 
> repeatedly found code where engine authors or porters would hack 
> around issues in ScummVM instead of talking to "the team" to figure 
> out together how to solve things properly. Many porters only pop in 
> (in the sense that I see commits & mails from then) when a new release 
> is imminent (often that means "the day before").  So, that seems to 
> make us an "umbrella" team?

I guess what rather makes us an "umbrella" team is that people are only 
informed about changes when they are affected. May it be because their 
code is touched or because they showed interest in something before. It 
is hard to follow the general ScummVM development direction when you do 
not hear anything about it. Sub team internal communication might be 
useful and ok for certain aspects, but I think major changes like now 
supporting SCI should be discussed with all of the team or at least made 
public before it is done.

> If you meant: "Hey, are we not a team and make all decisions together, 
> in consensus?" then my answer would be: Nope, and we've never been 
> that. As I see it, we always have been a meritocracy. I.e. "he who 
> gets something done has far more to say than the idle bystanders" ;-).

Actually I do not have major problems with the mentioned way of decision 
finding. I have rather a problem, that I can not even be an "idle 
bystander", because I am informed about it.

>
> In the past, I very often tried to email scummvm-devel about 
> something, to get feedback and help me decide how to do something. My 
> experience is that usually this didn't work out at all, or if, then 
> essentially with a tiny group (usually 1-3) of people actually talking.

I remember some of those mails. But I think the small feedback is not a 
reason to stop doing so. Especially when some of the then not discussed 
changes would have more people interested for whatever reason.

> I do think that we should talk about merge decisions etc. earlier on 
> scummvm-devel -- out of politeness / courtesy, at the very least. 
> Although I don't think this will actually change the way decisions are 
> made much, because most people will stay silent, and we will not 
> always end up with consensus decision either. But at least everybody 
> can have the feeling of having been informed in due time.

Maybe it would not change the decisions, but actually I think the 
politeness / courtesy argument is rather strong here.

// Johannes




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