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Re: [LUG] Development (this might be long!)

 

On Monday 21 March 2005 4:13 pm, Martin White wrote:
Very quickly, the point about mame was probably a bad example!

The page I found is quite old - it talks of an update fixing a problem but 
that update was part of KDE 2.2! The main website is clearer:
http://x.mame.net/  http://www.mame.net/

The 
mamedev's are a fairly extreme example of how devs can keep things to
themselves. I'm not aware of any public documentation on how  any of the
now massive program works

From just a few minutes reading the website, I can see why this is so. It is 
NOT to make things difficult. Quite the reverse, the current developers and 
testers appear to be protecting themselves from the floods of useless bug 
reports and patches that could overwhelm a large and complex project that 
doesn't seem to have a lot of developers.

From my perspective, games are an unrewarding area of development because the 
amount of help available is small compared to the amount of hassle from 
users. The documentation is probably available, once you become part of the 
team and you do that by merit.

(exe file in the region of 25mb before 
compression) and it is largely macro based. All the driver files make
little sense from a programming language point of view, hence the "wouldn't
know where to start" comment!

You start, in this specific example, by continuing as you have begun:

"How does one join?
Note that you will need to have reported a few bugs prior to joining, we can't 
just add everybody who sends an e-mail."
http://www.mametesters.org/faq.html

.....We recommend that you try to get a general understanding of how the MAME 
source is structured. We don't expect anyone to know how to program or 
anything (though that helps), but knowing which games are in which driver is 
quite handy....

That is quite friendly, really.

The problem of not getting credit for something comes from the fact that
(understandably) only certain people have access to the ftp.

But you submit patches to bugs via email, you can put anything you like in the 
comments in the patch.

Consequently i 
put a couple of new things in, passed the additions to the dev that i know
who then submitted them and the work gets credited to them!

You only need to put in your copyright statement. You don't need (and should 
NOT expect) a proclamation on any public website as gratitude.

Incidentally, have you actually read the licence for that project? It's not 
free software and it is not GNU GPL compatible. This has echoes of Robin's 
problems some time ago with another "open source" project that the main 
developer suddenly took out of open source. 
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/archive/2004/09/msg00046.html

You should always put a copyright notice in and you must always read the 
licence thoroughly.

To be fair, there are probably hundreds of people that contribute to that
project and it would be impossible to credit everyone - the code with
probably grow massively for starters!

Not many projects have that many developers. AUTHORS is a simple file that is 
part of all GNU software and it's a good way of collating that information. 
Also, each individual source file contains the copyright info of the original 
author plus anyone who has made substantial amendments / additions - 
irrespective of the licence. These are all comments, there's no harm in 
producing thousands of lines of comments like these. GnuCash certainly has 
MASSES of comments. See the Doxygen output on my site for an indication. The 
html documentation contains 1,400 files and is 34MB!
http://code.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/gnome2/

All that is generated from comments within the source tree - 1.6Mb compressed, 
3.4Mb in the Debian binary i386 package.

Comments, being plain text, are compressed really easily and it's no bother to 
have lots more. Honest. 


-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.dcglug.org.uk/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/
http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/
http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3

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