[Scummvm-devel] Understaffing (Was: What is happening to the ScummVM team?)

[Andre Heider]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:

> After thinking about this for a couple weeks, and watching what
> happens here, and trying to not do stuff but instead waiting for
> others to pick it up, I think I just cannot agree with this. In fact,
> I get more and more pissed off thinking about it. :-(. The following
> is not meant to be an attack against Johannes or anybody personal,
> BTW, I hope it doesn't come across like that. In fact, it's direct to
> the whole team -- since nobody objected to what Johannes wrote, I
> assume most of you either share his view or don't care.

I do understand how you draw your conclusions. I'd like to explain how
I see myself in this team, because I do care, but I don't feel
entitled to take part in decisions like this one: how this project is
run.

I only ported ScummVM to yet another platform. While that's nice, its
not really a breakthrough because the portable code base has already
been provided. I only know bits of that base, it feels like I just
scratched the surface. While it's been some month since I joined, I
still feel a little new around here - just because it's overwhelming
to see how much work already went into this project. And that feeling
just grows stronger while digging through more code and trying to
grasp its complexity :)

And then there's you and Eugene, putting effort into ScummVM for
years. As both of you said: There's much to be done to keep this
project running. Both of you took most of these tasks. Your
experiment, asking "someone" to do those instead, was of no avail.
Conclusion: There is a difference between a normal developer and a
lead. A big team requires leads imho, leads who take responsibility
and push the project in the right direction.

> Most of you are probably not here because you want to manage stuff.
> Fair enough.  So you rely on "someone else" for all the annoying work,
> or you don't care at all about it. Again, fair enough, your free
> choice. But I feel that without a few people pushing things ahead
> (portability, maintenance of web/forums/wiki, building new
> infrastructure, GSoC, ...), then we wouldn't be were we are now. Not
> by far.

<snip>

> I got more and more frustrated in the past weeks. I feel that I am
> being asked to work with a committee instead of just doing my job, but
> the committee doesn't even bother to meet up, let alone "help".
> Recently I wonder more and more, "where's the fun in it for me?" It
> used to be that I was proud because I felt that I helped ScummVM reach
> new level of portability and extensibility that it couldn't achieve
> beforehand, that I felt I made a difference by pushing the quality of
> the project, and by ensuring things just run. But when you have to
> write reports on that stuff, it suddenly isn't fun anymore.

(replying to Joost's mail here too)

If its no fun anymore there's something wrong. To change that I like
Joost's proposal (independent of what a ScummVM leader is and does):
find people to do specific tasks (aka annoying work), people who have
fun at it. There're people who enjoy managing http servers, forums and
wikis or the like. There're also people who have fun setting up
environments for multiple toolchains and an automatism for a build
server. We "just" have to find those :)

You asked to prove you wrong, and while there's already an ongoing
discussion about e.g. one or more webmaster(s), I'm willing to look
into a build server setup (like buildbot) if thats okay.

Oh, and I think we already have a t-shirt guy :P

Regards,
Andre