Horde3D

As most of you probably know, Volker and I have less time for working on Horde at the moment since we both have day time jobs now. Although this does certainly not mean that the project is stopped, development is progressing much slower compared to the time where we were still working for university.

Luckily we have a very capable and motivated community that keeps posting patches all the time. Although that helps a lot, it is still much work to review and adapt patches so that they fit perfectly to the overall standards of Horde. It would be more convenient and faster if the more experienced contributers could commit them directly. But since we all want to keep the main branch as stable as possible, the idea of an experimental branch controlled by the community came up. Basically that's a great idea. We hope to get an evolutionary collaborative development process through that. Someone can write a patch and commit it and if it is not yet perfect (or close to that ) someone else can refactor it. If a feature is mature enough it can be integrated to the main branch. This keeps the main branch clean from too many intermediate checkins that still need a bit refactoring or fixing in later revisions and helps to keep up the high quality standards of Horde.

So how will that work in detail? We are happy that the University of Augsburg (specifically the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications) is willing to host the community branch on its svn server. Many thanks to Professor André here for her great support. Every experienced community member can apply for write access to the community branch. Members who have already contributed a patch or are experienced with Horde have very good chances to be accepted. To apply, just post a private message to Volker. He will handle the user management.

We really hope to get a few sophisticated new features and fixes from the community branch. Besides that, I will have my personal non-public research branch where I will try out some new concepts. Volker will be responsible for integrating patches to the main branch. As most of you have probably already suspected, he is officially the chief maintainer of Horde3D now.

All this idea of a more community centric development process is still very experimental and we will see how it works out. But we think it has a lot of potential and we are very excited about it...

The new repository is available under: http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/public/Horde3D
A live notification channel is available under http://cia.vc/stats/project/Horde3D.

Everybody has read access. If you want to have write access please write me a PM.

Of course there are some restrictions:
You are not allowed to upload copyright protected files. You should commit only tested things and should not upload code that does not compile on your own development platform. If you are not sure if things you've developed are running on other platforms please post some details about your submission in the development section on the forums, so other people get informed and can test it on their platforms.

We can only accept code that is distributed under the same license as Horde3D and assume that your submission is under the currently used Horde3D license if no other license statements are present.

Further details and usage rules will follow in an additional post.

Good This will multiply Horde3D development acceleration. Is it possible to do this with the Horde3D wiki too ? [I mean growing the wiki by the community members]

Go ahead, you're allowed to do that, it's a wiki after all :p

Dear Siavash,

The wiki is open to edit by all, except the main page that is locked to prevent tampering. To upload images you need to ask access right to the Wiki_Upload group. You can see a list of users by visiting this link: http://horde3d.org/wiki/index.php5?titl ... :Listusers

Fell free to PM me if you have any question regarding how to use the wiki.

Thank you very much

why don't you use google code?

Not much point hosting externally if you have the resources to do it in house

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

how long can they host? I don't want the svn to disappear.

Please forget about the google code, it's blocked on my country and I can't download projects such as Bullet physic engine, ...

It gives the following message :

You are accessing this page from a forbidden country

There is currently no reason why they shouldn't host it for the next 20 years.
And if we want to move the repository some day it shouldn't be a problem to make an svn dump and import it somewhere else.

Sounds like a good idea overall.

However, an immediate concern of mine (and I'm sure of others) is how contributors can minimize the damage they cause to the work of other contributors and vice-versa. Obviously communication is very important.

It would probably be helpful if the WIKI had a page devoted to what's being worked on, under discussion, and completed in regards to the community branch. There's already the forums, IRC, im clients out the wazoo, and such that discussion of what / how different things should / could be done isn't an issue.

A locked sticky in the developer section that is periodically updated to include details of what sections of the code or classes that have been agreed as "hands-off" would be useful for documenting periods where the group has assigned code ownership in the event of something major.

Is it possible for each new feature to be worked on in a separate branch? This might also make it easier to patch new features back into the real SVN repo.

It is possible, but as long as the changes are not too big I think we can keep it in the main trunk branch.

If someone wants to start a DirectX or OpenGL ES renderer, it may be useful to add a branch. IMHO it always depends if the changes are only some additions to the official Horde3D sources or if we have a complete break, where the functionality of the original Horde3D has been reduced or broken.

Of course communication is VERY important. I would prefer if general discussions will be held in the forums, while more specific discussions to a development point of the Community Roadmap can be added to a specific Wiki page for that point (e.g. the Compressed Texture Support Page ).

But maybe it makes more sense to add only the results of discussions (of whatever communication channel) to the wiki pages since personally I think it is much more comfortable to discuss using the forums, skype, IRC, or whatever. The advantage of using the forums is that everyone can read it and can comment it. While IRC is of course also open for all users, it does not have a memory where users that joined later can follow the development discussion.

Time will tell us what will be the best practice. But since we have all rights to administrate the SVN on the community server, it shouldn't be too much problem to rearrange the structure if we find some better management in the future.

I'm hanging on the IRC channel with another nick as well... just idling mostly, because I've been really busy. If you want to reach me, just address cantele and it will highlight on my screen.