How developers of the scummvm project take the decisions.

[ziul1979]

Hi, I don't know exactly where to post this message, for this reason I put in the General Discussion, my name is Luis, in the last days I have been trying to find how the developers of the scummvm project take the decisions in the project.

I found some information on forums and webpages but not much about this , I'm doing this because I must do a homework (a report) about how works a project of software of my choice and I choose the scummvm, and this is part of the report.

If someone have any information or know useful links please let me know.

Thanks for your help
P.S. Excuse me for my bad english.

[Kaminari]

Decision making inside the team is actually very easy. They all gather naked in a dark room and Fingolfin whips them to death until they all wholeheartedly agree on one unanimous choice. Works a treat!

[sev]

Decision making inside the team is actually very easy. They all gather naked in a dark room and Fingolfin whips them to death until they all wholeheartedly agree on one unanimous choice. Works a treat!

Exactly

Additional way is:

We have several media for our communication. Primary channel is #scummvm on freenode. We discuss there all on-going work. However, on important or significant decisions, the one sends a draft of his proposal to -devel, and probably sets up a Wiki page. Then all interested parties comment and give their suggestions.

A good example of such important things is a change which involves OSystem, hardware abstraction layer of ScummVM, since that touches a lot of people, i.e. porters, and of course, nobody has knowledge on every platform which we support.

The project itself is quite big. Its current SLOCC count (pure lines of code, wihout comments and empty lines) is more than 340,000. We have several independent subteams, usually divided by engine or subsystem, like OSystem or sound. You discuss the way you do things within your subteam, and if you need something which puts influence on other parts of the code, you better ask responsible subteam first.

Then there go our main devs. They maintain overall project shape and that mainly involves everything besides engines/ directory, i.e. OSystem and ScummVM infrastructure.

Now ask more specific questions and I'll try to give you correct answers.


Eugene

[fingolfin]

Decision making inside the team is actually very easy. They all gather naked in a dark room and Fingolfin whips them to death until they all wholeheartedly agree on one unanimous choice. Works a treat!

Not quite it. That should read: "... and Fingolfin whips them to near-death until they all wholeheartedly agree on his unanimous choice."

[fingolfin]

But seriously: I recall seeing a website that explained various forms of managment, development, etc. for open source projects, and they actually had ScummVM as one of their examples. Unfortunately I can't find it...

All that Eugene said is right, but doesn't paint the full picture... we have properties of a Meritocracy (the more achievements you make, the more weight your oppinion has... so somebody who wrote two engines and maintains a port is more likely to be heard than somebody who never coded a single line but only provides bug reports).

And we also have some properties of a decentralised benevolent dictatorship. I.e. the subteam can do things on their own, but sometimes I will say how we should do things or that I don't like something, but I try to reduce that to an absolute minimum in order to not piss of people. But e.g. when new patches arrive, I usually try to review them and enforce our coding gudelines etc. before accepting them.

If you haven't yet, I recommend reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. Also take a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Power_structure.

[clem]

two ScummVM-specific examples:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/CVS_vs_SVN
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=418823

hope that helps to give your paper some spicy quotes ,
clem

[ziul1979]

Thanks for the help to everyone, it have been very useful, right now I only need to know two more thing, if someone wants to answer me this questions :

How do you think is the present state of the project ScummVM?

and

Which do think are the ideas that the community of ScummVM have with respect to future of the project?


Thanks.