[tsc-devel] SFML and further development process

Quintus | Mon, 05 Oct 2015 15:38:02 UTC

Hi everyone,

it has become evident that the SFML port is a huge work that will still
take a lot of time to be completed. Waiting for me doing it will slow
down progress quite heavily. I thus want to make this a high-priority
issue now and pursue it for one of the next releases, postponing each
and every other issue on the tracker until it is done. simpletoon, Luiji,
could you two please take a look at the SFML code I already wrote (and
documented), and tell me if you think you can familiarise yourself with
it, and then work on it together with me? The current state of affairs
is that everyone of us does some rather little things on his own, but
the SFML porting stuff is too large for me. I need help. And this means
we need to coordinate our work so we don’t get into one another’s way of
programming.

Once you looked at it, please file tickets on the tracker regarding all
tasks that you think are still pending, and tag them with the “SFML
port” tag. This will give us a list of tasks that are outstanding. We
then have to bring them into a useful dependency hierarchy (a shame that
GitHub’s tracker doesn’t properly support issue dependencies; we need to
simply put comments into the tickets), and then tackle them bottom-up
one-by-one. I think if we three work together to systematically cut this
down, we can succeed in a reasonable amount of time.

The key to managing this huge task is the word “systematically”. Please
do not simply start something. Let us first create all the tickets, then
order them, and when this both is done, take whatever bottom-most task
in the dependency hierarchy is unassigned, assign it to you, and
implement it. It is desirable to have the tasks on the tracker be sized
such a way that one ticket does not take more than a week to implement
(roughly). This should allow everyone to get this into his free time,
and most importantly, it allows to finish one ticket and then abstain
for some time when real life issues are more important, afterwards then
a new one-week task can be picked up. That means, if you assign a ticket
with the “SFML port” tag to yourself, you have decided to dedicate the
next week to this issue. Do not assign it to yourself if you don’t know
whether you have time during the next week.

That’s the theory. I know some issues come out more difficult then they
go in. In that case please post a description of the problem into the
ticket, and consider extracting a subproblem into a new ticket, if
possible. If necessary, unassign yourself from the ticket again.

datahead, I only mentioned Luiji and simpletoon above, because they have
been rather quiet during the last time. However, of course you — and
likewise anybody else who is able to program — are invited to join these
efforts in getting the SFML port out of the door.

I am available for any questions regarding the SFML-related code. You
can find that code in the “feature-sfml-port” branch. I merged the
separate “sfml_level_loading” branch I worked on lately into that branch
to consolidate all SFML-related stuff into that one branch before we
start off our joint work so that it is easier to familiarise yourself
with the code. Please also read the documentation comments I left in the
code.

Please give feedback about this issue. We need to go forward.

Valete,
Quintus

-- 
#!/sbin/quintus
Blog: http://www.guelkerdev.de

GnuPG key: F1D8799FBCC8BC4F