The new Irrlicht-CVS and patch tracking

Baal Cadar · Post by **Baal Cadar** » Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:30 pm

Since late December Irrlicht has (finally!) an open CVS repository here at sf.

It is a perfect tool to actually centralise the irrlicht development a bit. Today the situation is, that if someone found a bug in irrlicht or made an improvement, he/she noted it here in the forum and hosted the patch on his/her. So, when you are in the situation, that you actually need it and you have a faint recollection "There was something". You had to search the forum for the link and author. And there is no guarantee that sites stay online forever anyway.

Sourceforge provides a patch tracker tool, that is currently deactivated for irrlicht. But wouldn't it be great to have all the patches in one central place over at sourceforge instead of distributed all over the net. The sourceforge tracker also has the advantage, that you see the state of a patch, so you can see if this patch is maybe already applied to the current version and doesn't need to be applied anymore. The patch can be discussed in an open, traceable way.

While I am at it, sf also provides a CVS notification mailing list. This mailing list sends note on every commit with an overview on what changed. A very valuable tool too. I don't want to miss it for the projects that provide it.

What do you guys and girls think?

dhenton9000 · Post by **dhenton9000** » Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:45 pm

I think that having someone act as gatekeeper is over all a better approach, so I would suggest not activating the patch installation for general use. Niko and/or someone else should post only "official" patches.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Baal Cadar · Post by **Baal Cadar** » Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:59 pm

I don't see them as "official" patches. A patch is just a patch. Take it or leave it, it is not work of the official team, as else it wasn't a patch, but actually part of the source. A patch becomes official the moment it is committed to the source imo.

The "too many cooks" situation is what we have right now. Too many places with patches with varying merits. The question is if to have all the patches cluttered all over the net, or in a single place with the tools at hand to search the one that fits your needs and to discuss it.

Of course there have to be guidelines about the patches. SF allows to upload text to the submit page, so, that one can say what's accepted and what not.
One point probably is the code guidlines http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/faq.html#rules another some words on what kind of improvement patches are welcome (bugfixes are always welcome of course)

This makes the Irrlicht team's work easier too, imo. Since they get their fixes spoon-fed to a central place.

The posibility to simply remove a patch is always there and as is a way to comment on it, requesting its improvement or discussing what it does. No place currently providing Irrlicht patches gives these possibilities.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:04 pm

The Wiki would be a place where more than one or two persons could edit the patch status. IIRC, with 0.14 some pages which were to start such a process were provided, but I don't know the current status. Maybe I should move my patch page there. Using the patch tracker is not a good idea if it would be in a similar state like the bug tracker at SF. But if Niko will have some people in the team that care for SF pages it could be worth reevaluating the alternatives.