Angband development process

[TJS]

Being curious I was wondering, how does the whole maintainer process work exactly? Is it always just one person for Angband? How do they get chosen? Is the focus more on refining the current game rather than adding new features?

I know Nethack had a team of people working in relative secrecy (and I think the Angband method is better personally with everything being out in the open). Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has a team of people, which probably makes things move a lot faster, although it does seem that they add loads of new features/classes/races constantly which puts me off trying to play it.

[d_m]

We have a team of developers but one of them (Takkaria) is the official maintainer.

Basically it means that if there is an argument or a deep change being considered he gets final say and/or veto power. Given the number of variants that exist and the tension surrounding how "vanilla" Angband should be, I think it works out.

At times there is a lot of developer discussion on IRC... other times it's pretty quiet.

EDIT: To answer your question about getting chosen: in the past retiring maintainers have nominated new ones. In Takkaria's case the previous maintainer had fallen off the map and the community backed his desire to assume maintainership.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by d_m

We have a team of developers but one of them (Takkaria) is the official maintainer.

Basically it means that if there is an argument or a deep change being considered he gets final say and/or veto power. Given the number of variants that exist and the tension surrounding how "vanilla" Angband should be, I think it works out.

At times there is a lot of developer discussion on IRC... other times it's pretty quiet.

EDIT: To answer your question about getting chosen: in the past retiring maintainers have nominated new ones. In Takkaria's case the previous maintainer had fallen off the map and the community backed his desire to assume maintainership.

IMO that's usually how it works - I can't remember the last time a maintainer was nominated by anything other than general consensus. It used to be discussed on rgra (Usenet), but I imagine that when Takk steps down it'll all happen here.

The team dynamic is pretty informal too - anyone can join the team, if they can convince Takk to grant them commit access to svn (e.g. by sending him a half-decent patch). Willingness is much more important than ability. So far there's never been an argument where two devs have wanted to work on the same piece of code - there just aren't enough of us for that.

[Marble Dice]

Originally Posted by Magnate

The team dynamic is pretty informal too - anyone can join the team, if they can convince Takk to grant them commit access to svn (e.g. by sending him a half-decent patch)

Not to mention patches are always encouraged, even if you don't have commit access. Bug fixes and user interface improvements are always welcome, and even minor gameplay changes aren't usually too controversial.

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by Marble Dice

Not to mention patches are always encouraged, even if you don't have commit access. Bug fixes and user interface improvements are always welcome, and even minor gameplay changes aren't usually too controversial.

I thought there was a thread somewhere on 'how to make/submit patches," but last I looked, I couldn't find it.