Angband maintainer

[Nick]

Those paying attention to the Angband codebase may have noticed that, while I've been pulling other people's changes in (where "other people" mostly means backwardsEric), I have made very few changes myself in the last year. From my perspective, there are a few reasons for this:

1. Real Life has been giving me less time to work on *band development generally;
2. Beleriand;
3. Sil;
4. Version 4.2 contained most of the things I was burning to do.

Given this, plus the fact that it's more than seven years since my first Angband release, it seems worth asking the question: Should someone else be taking over as maintainer?

I have been thinking about this for a while, but have delayed raising it here out of a combination of inertia and there being no obvious outcries about my lack of development activity. But I feel like it's time to at least put the question out there.

So, what do you think?

[Bill Peterson]

Would it be reasonable for you to continue pulling together other people's changes, becoming the Linus Torvalds of Angband? Vanilla is a pretty mature and mostly bug free game, maybe we should leave significant changes to someone who's willing to put in the work, rather than making suggestions to you.

If you reallyy want to pass the torch, then that's another discussion.

[EugeneLesnov]

I agree. It makes sense.

[tangar]

I like how Nick organized everything. And Nick is very active too. It doesn't come to actual commits IMHO, more like a overall activity and 'keeping a watchful eye' over community, bugs, other devs commits. IMHO maintainer job is more like 'review' other devs commits rather than making them by itself. And Nick's activity is pretty good in this area. So I'm against moving Nick from this position (sorry Nick, you SHALL NOT pass!).

I hope Nick will continue keeping watchful eye on Angband for next 10 years or even more. Even though I didn't agreed with some past Nick's decisions at first, later on I accepted them and simply look at V Angband as a core which give freedom for people to implement their own visions in their variants. Nick is a very good maintainer.

[rhukath]

I don't have any issues with how Nick maintains things.

If he has issues with timelines, I would say that perhaps having a co-maintainer might be the way to go rather than handing over all in one go. Then he can see how things go and decide if he does want to completely hand over the reins.

[MITZE]

I don't really see a pressing issue that stepping down or passing the torch has become immediately important, unless you want to step down so you have less responsibility; unless I've missed something I don't think there's someone else chomping at the bit to maintain.

Dumb question, but has Vanilla ever not had a maintainer? Not up on my *band history specifics.

[jackwilson]

Originally Posted by rhukath

I don't have any issues with how Nick maintains things.

If he has issues with timelines, I would say that perhaps having a co-maintainer might be the way to go rather than handing over all in one go. Then he can see how things go and decide if he does want to completely hand over the reins.

Yes you are right I also thinks the same a co-maintainer would be very helpful for Nick...

[EugeneLesnov]

Originally Posted by Nick

Should someone else be taking over as maintainer

Does backwardsEric agree to become maintainer?

[emar]

Originally Posted by EugeneLesnov

Does backwardsEric agree to become maintainer?

This or backwardsEric as co-maintainer seem like the obvious conclusion.

[Nick]

OK, thanks everyone.

My main problem with remaining maintainer was my own feeling that I wasn't doing the job justice. I've asked backwardsEric, and his response was in accord with what everyone else is saying, so I'm happy to leave it at that for now.

Now I can get back to ruining the game with good conscience