Re: [glob2-devel] Glob2 salvage proposal

[Andrew Sayers]

I've done a few rewrites of this e-mail, and as I've been writing it
I've started to think about the career of a contributor to an OSS
project.  For people like me who have come to a pre-existing project and
started adding to it, I think people generally start by tinkering around
the edges, then gradually working their way into the project as their
interest and ability develop.  In my case, I started by writing
documentation, then looked at the code to get answers to my questions
about how things worked, then started rewriting bits of code, and slowly
came to do a complete rewrite of several sections of the program.

I don't think Glob2 has any problem attracting new developers, but we
can't really retain them, because that career path from tinkerer to core
developer just isn't there.  Because there isn't much documentation and
the code can be quite hard to read, it can take weeks to get started
doing anything interesting, by which time peoples' interest tends to
fade.

I agree that we need to focus on making a game that better retains
developers, but I think that's better done by documenting, rewriting,
and reducing the code we've already got than writing a whole lot more.

The question I think we need to ask at the moment, and that I'd like
everyone reading this to answer, is: how much time do you have to spare
for Glob2, and what could you develop an interest in doing?

Personally, my interest is in making a good strong engine for the game.
I can afford to many several hours on the code most weeks (although this
fluctuates - some weeks I'm snowed under, other weeks I'm glad of the
distraction) and am quite happy ploughing through code that I can later
rewrite.

Stephane: do you have time to document code, or even rewrite it?  I
think a lot of the code could do with generally being reorganised in a
more logical way, which you're the only person that can do because
you're the only person with a wide enough understanding of the whole
program.

        - Andrew