[Scummvm-devel] Searching for extra porters

[Max Horn]

Hi there,

I was thinking that we should conduct an official search for more porters for (some) existing porters. It is obvious that some of our porters have very little time for maintaining their ports. And it might be helpful to have some helping hands in there. A second person means a higher likelihood that somebody has time to look into fixing a bug, or making a release binary.

Potential drawbacks are conflicts about in which direction to develop a port; and of corse the classic "what, I thought *you* were going to make the release binary".

Still, with some effort, I would hope that (should we find people) this would invigorate the respective ports. However, I don't want to do this "behind porters" backs; this is not meant to cut anybody out of the loop at all, but rather to help certain ports to be their best, and to also help the porters themselves. I absolutely know how it is when you just don't have time, when work is eating you away. Personally, I am myself very happy that vinterstum is providing Mac OS X binaries, as it removes that burden from me -- but if he ever has no time for it, I'm still here to act as a backup. I wish it was like that for more ports (I really should look into getting ScummVM for iPhone compiling, so I can act as a backup there, too).

For example, we still don't have builds for Android (Gus is not replying to our emails, either :/, and Andre has no access to the market account), Wii+Gamecube (Andre promised it'll come soon. note that we also never got a 1.2.1 binary), GP2x, Caanoo, OpenPandora, IRIX.


Anyway, the plan would be to make some announcement on the website, and maybe try to get in touch with some "news outlets" (slashdot?) and ask for volunteers who help out with existing ports (possibly naming a few explicitly), but also for new ports.

Thoughts?
Max