W00T! Yeah, we're finally moving!

Joseph Carter knghtbrd at bluecherry.net
Mon Jun 24 06:43:00 EDT 2002


Hey everyone, it looks like everyone here got a message from Ryan Gordon
saying that we're moving off of SourceForge and you've all been migrated
to the new lists.  Not everyone has been following things as they happen
on irc (it's amazing, but it seems that some of you guys have a life -
where you got it or what you'd do with such a thing is beyond my
imagination), so I figure I should explain what has been going on here in
Twilightland.

As Ryan said, we're moving off of SourceForge.  The transition has gone
slowly because we wanted everything to "just work" when it was moved.
This didn't happen naturally, but things have gone about as well as we
could reasonably expect.  The big hangup was that Ryan was probably
expecting us to have a CVS module - we handed him a whole repository full
of modules, with more planned.  So far as us IRC idlers can guess, he saw
the repository and said "ACK!", but it seems to be working now.  =)


Now here's the part of the message where I become not nice for a moment.
I've been asked once or twice already why we're moving off SourceForge,
after all they have a big (and getting bigger) mirror network, they
provide lots of services to projects, they already host tons of other
projects, and their infrastructure is probably much more mature than
anything we'd find on a small system hosting a dozen or so projects, such
as icculus.org.  If they've got all of that going for them, why move?

To be quite honest, the changes to their usage policy have been worrying
us for quite some time.  And besides that, the service just stinks.  For
the past ten months, I have been the only person who could reliably update
the project's website.  This is because the mechanism we use to keep the
webpage you saw matching the one we were working on broke more often than
it worked.  We reported the problem to SF's staff, they said they knew
about the problem, no fix was planned.  This also broke our nightly CVS
snapshots on average twice a week.  Again, no planned fix.

Additionally, after I got out of the hospital last month (I'm much better
now, thanks for your support everyone!), I was eager to get back to work,
post my scribbled notes, etc.  But I couldn't post to twilight-devel!
Their servers were set to ignore any mail coming from a modem in an
attempt to thwart spammers.  Real statistics show this doesn't actually
work (and spam is still a big problem on SF), but they're not planning to
change it.  So I spent three days working with Ben Winslow of bluecherry
trying to work around the problem.  My mail relay works, but I still can't
send mail to SF lists or addresses.  Why not?  They don't know, but it
must be my fault - SF is not going to change anything.

These are two examples of half a dozen in the past year.  Several of
SourceForge's supporters have told me in recent months that if I don't
like the service, I'm not paying for it and don't have to use it.  That is
quite true, of course, and the whole reason for the move.  There was a
time when the admins came to us, asking how they could make things easier
for us to use, but the individual projects don't seem to matter to them
anymore.  Ryan has spent more effort in the past six days setting up
things which none of his other projects have ever asked for than the
entire SF admin team has spent in the past six months fixing bugs we've
reported to them.

So while we thank SourceForge for hosting us, the time has come for us to
move on to a host which can better serve our needs.  Our needs are rather
modest, if somewhat specialised.  So everyone please give a big thanks to
icculus.org for having us, test everything you can with the new server as
they come online, and let us know on this list if anything breaks.  ;)



WHAT THIS MEANS TO YOU (in case you were skipping the above not-niceness)
is this:

 - The mailing list setups have changed
 - The location of the CVS repository has changed
 - The location of the website _will_ change (hasn't yet)
 - We've absorbed DarkPlaces, it's moved into our CVS tree  =)

http://icculus.org/twilight/beta has a mockup of what the new page will
kinda look like.  It uses a lot more images than the old site, even though
it doesn't really look like it.  It doesn't render in lynx properly yet
(I'll fix it) and the title graphic looks wrong in MSIE (I've already
fixed this in my local copy of the pages), but generally it's a big
improvement.  Take a look, let me know what you think.  If you use mozilla
when you look (what, you don't use mozilla?) you'll find it looking pretty
much the way I intend for it to look.


The list setup is now very different from SourceForge.  The thing you want
to match on now is the header "Mailing-List:", which will contain the
string twilight-<something>-help which you may match on.  If you want my
procmail recipe for this, here it is:

:0
* ^Mailing-List:.*twilight-\/[A-Za-z0-9]*
twilight/twilight-${MATCH}/

Note the trailing slash, if you're writing to mbox folders, you don't want
that.  I write to maildir folders, so I do.  If you have no idea what the
above means or does, don't worry - it's a unix mail sorting thingy and you
already know what it is if you're using it to sift through your mail.


Checking out anonymous CVS is different than it used to be too.  Set the
CVS repository to :pserver:anonymous at cvs.icculus.org:/cvs/cvsroot/twilight
and login, the passwd is "anonymous" (because some retarded front-ends
need _some_ passwd..)  Then you can check out any module in the tree, or
all of them at once if you check out ".", which I recommend.  In unix, you
do that like this:

% cvs -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.icculus.org:/cvs/cvsroot/twilight login
[type anonymous when prompted]
% cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.icculus.org:/cvs/cvsroot/twilight co .
[watch lots of lines scroll by]

CvsGUI (WinCVS) users are on their own because I don't know how to use it,
sorry.  The repository for people with icculus.org logins is:

<username>@cvs.icculus.org:/cvs/cvsroot/twilight

If you don't know your username, you have problems (or you don't have an
account, and need not worry about this..)


As I noted, DarkPlaces has been merged into our CVS tree.  Why?  Because
there are literally three people who work on it, and we're all also
working on Twilight.  For our part the DP engine is probably not as
important as the hmap stuff is, other than that we've been using DP as a
testbed for things we'd like to see in Twilight for some time now and may
continue doing so.  More tools will be forthcoming in preparation for
being able to do the TC we've been talking about off and on for the past
six months or so.  If you're following DP out of CVS, you probably should
start following our CVS tree for it.


If you have patches against the SF tree of either twilight or darkplaces,
do a cvs diff, save that, and then patch it over the icculus CVS tree.  If
you're in Win32 or on a Mac and don't have patch, send the patch here and
we'll do something with it.

Several people who used to have CVS commit access don't anymore.  I
promised that we'd set up a patch manager so that we can better keep track
of submissions not only from those who don't work on the code actively,
but from anyone who has something they'd like to contribute.  I don't have
a system for doing this efficiently in place yet, sorry.  I'm working on
it - I've just had trouble finding any models that work much better than a
mailing list.  In the meantime, if you have a patch, send it to this list.
We're not QuakeForge, we will actually review these things and apply them
if they don't break anything.  If they do, we'll either fix them or tell
you what's wrong with it so you can.  In either case, we _will_ let you
know what's happening with your contribution.  If it was important enough
for you to write the code, it certainly is important enough for us to look
at it. right?



That's just about all I think.  Feel free to reply with any questions you
have, or if you are feeling impatient we can still be found on IRC in the
#Twilight channel on irc.anynet.org (though you will find me basically
asleep most of the day and awake all of the night in United States time
zones currently..)

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd at bluecherry.net>                    Not many fishes
 
* Omnic looks at his 33.6k link and then looks at Joy
* Mercury cuddles his cable modem.. (=:]

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