The Community

[MarkTraceur]

All right, briefly this morning I'd like to ping you all about the Minetest community. It's bad.

1. The community largely doesn't submit C++ code.
2. The community doesn't have any access to the core repository.
3. There are very few resources for new developers.
4. The existing community isn't welcoming to newcomers.
5. There are no apparent "leaders" in the community, even though a few people are very active.

So here's my proposal to you: Someone should step up, say "enough!" and sort some of this out. You'll note that, while it was the first issue I raised, C++ programming was only 20% of my gripe. If you can't program at all, but love the game, you could make a huge change in how the rest of the world sees this project--which is good, because right now the world can't see much more than an inactive project maintainer and a very juvenile community that enjoys trolling.

So please, step up and start taking over some of the responsibility. Speak up in IRC and on the forums when someone is trolling. Call staff over if necessary. Start writing some documentation--not just "this is how you write this in C++", but "this is how you should interact with our community".

If this doesn't happen, people will keep leaking out of the project. And nobody wants that. This is a great piece of software, but it needs the support of an equally great community. Let's *be* that community.

[Casimir]

2. The community doesn't have any access to the core repository.

Biggest problem here. If I would have the time, I would make a community fork and start learning C++ (in this order).

5. There are no apparent "leaders" in the community, even though a few people are very active.

That's the best thing here. It's just a bunch of people sitting together making good stuff without anybody "leading" the "project" in order to reach any "goal".

[mauvebic]

Already lua and C++/irrlicht are not exactly the same ballpark. Though when people chose to involve themselves in the C++ side of things, they immediately go for a fork, even if it's to add one or two marginal features. Then they get discouraged and giveup because no one wants to play a fork when all the mods are here.

I would propose instead, that the community issue challenges for patches. One patch i would personally like to see: diagonal drawing support for nodebox. The game already draws diagonally for liquids and raillike items, so i suspect there might be some useful code already there. Another patch idea: more GUI elements (drop-downs, radio,.. all the html ones). etc.

There's no shortage of small manageable projects :-)

[VanessaE]

The problem with forking and making tweaks therein is not that no one wants to play that fork, since it is a necessity for making changes to the game engine in the first place. I'd say it's more often because those changes, while well-intentioned, don't get propagated back into the mainline engine. It's up to celeron55 to say why in any given case, though.

[Casimir]

Can somebody please explain the github-thing to me? Who can edit the code, and how? And what exactly are the forks doing?

[Iqualfragile]

its not about learning c++, thats just the syntax.
its about building a game-engine instead of just adding content inside of an fully managed script-environment. thats a HUGE difference, and i dont think that i would want random people to change the engine, nor would i want that from c55 perspective.

and it seems like there is not realy anybody around who has experience with that, allso c55 seems to have no time/interest for training others.

and that is bad, realy, it is, he (you, if you read this) needs to think about whether minetest is his (your) project or an community effort.
right now he (you) is (are) not working enought on it for declaring it as his private project and merges back too litle ammounts of changes and gives too less people (nobody) access to the main-repos for it to be an community-effort.

[PilzAdam]

Can somebody please explain the github-thing to me? Who can edit the code, and how? And what exactly are the forks doing?

GitHub is a website where you can share code. Each project has a own "repository" which contains the code. Only the owner of the repository ("repo") (for Minetest its celeron55) can edit the code.
Repos can be forked, which means that other people clone the code and copy it to a own repo, so they can change the code.
Changes from forks can be merged back into the main repo.

[Iqualfragile]

Actualy you can allow more then one person to edit one repos, its not limited to its owner but celeron55 does not do that, and thats why there are 150 minetest-forks.

[Mito551]

Actualy you can allow more then one person to edit one repos, its not limited to its owner but celeron55 does not do that, and thats why there are 150 minetest-forks.

i'm sure it's biggest problem. we should make a community github. so everyone can change it. make one big fork.

[mauvebic]

yeah id rather see a 'community edition' than give every tom ,dick and harry access to the mainline to possibly screw it up lol or do things to the mainline that works for a minority of the playerbase (more cpu intensive stuff)

[Casimir]

Actualy you can allow more then one person to edit one repos, its not limited to its owner but celeron55 does not do that, and thats why there are 150 minetest-forks.

That's what I wanted to know.
So it seems to me we just need to make a fork, everybody can edit and that is commonly accepted to solve this problem.

@mauvebic
If you think it would destroy a program if people can edit it, you should buy minecraft and not play an open source game ;)
The key-word is self-organisation. If you think somebody is doing something stupid, talk to him and discus and find a solution.

[Neuromancer]

yeah id rather see a 'community edition' than give every tom ,dick and harry access to the mainline to possibly screw it up lol or do things to the mainline that works for a minority of the playerbase (more cpu intensive stuff)

+1 I like this idea, a community edition of Minetest, where folks can go nuts, try some stuff and who knows what will happen. Then also have c55's stable version that could cherry pick some of the best ideas in the community edition.

[mauvebic]

If you think it would destroy a program if people can edit it, you should buy minecraft and not play an open source game ;)

I think there are more people who think they know what they're doing than there actually are, and i think some people would likely make changes that benefit only a small handful. Thats why why gnome 2 > gnome 3. What i dont get is why some users need to inflict their way of gaming on all others.

A community edition would provide a buffer against ill-conceived ideas and modifications :-)

[trukoil]

This should give a system like the RedHat-Fedora one (stable and company ruled RedHat, testing with more/updated features on community driven Fedora)? Sounds good

[Casimir]

I made a fork of the minetest_game based on PilzAdams fork.
https://github.com/CasimirKaPazi/minetest_game
I don't know if you can edit this (I'm very new to github). If you can, feel free to do so. The only rule is: consensus.

[Iqualfragile]

i dont think this is gona be a problem, pilzadam will allow others to add stuffs to his minetest_game

[PilzAdam]

i dont think this is gona be a problem, pilzadam will allow others to add stuffs to his minetest_game

Sure.

[mauvebic]

Just to be clear i was referring to the engine not minetest_game :p

but yeah, lately the default minetest_game has too much stuff in it.

[trukoil]

Talking about a fork... http://minetest.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3280

[cornernote]

yes, it seems the community is revolting!

also, a revolution is coming...

[jordan4ibanez]

You're all stupid lol

[MarkTraceur]

A poignant argument as always, j4i.