[aquaria] Is the project still alive?

[Dustin Voss]

I clearly owe you a few apologies.

You were porting to a whole new operating system; I do not mean to claim that you could have build feature branches directly from the icculus source code under those circumstances. You could not have. When I pointed you out as a bad example, first, I was kind of teasing you. I apologize for not adding a smiley or something to make that clear; I sometimes forget to over-emote on the Internet. I remain impressed by what you’ve done with the Aquaria sources and did use several of your patches. Second, I was only pointing you out as a bad example of what best practices are. You were not in a position to follow them, and so you did not, and that is okay. I also apologize for not writing that caveat.

Your offer to roll up a bunch of patches and send them in is generous, I think. I would certainly take advantage of it were I to have worked at Bit Blot (and you are right, I am unfamiliar with its history and was surprised to learn it was defunct). But my point was that massive intermingled changes like yours are difficult to integrate for a third party. I was trying to point out things we can do to make changes EASY to integrate. And a patch roll-up is one of those things, yes. I did not know that you made that offer.

Finally, I say “we” have opted not to fork because I do not remember much discussion of forking Aquaria on the mailing list, so I concluded that no one was seriously considering the idea. Until now, that is.


On Apr 11, 2011, at 4:19 AM, Andrew Church wrote:

>> That is how distributed version control works.  None of us have
>> permission to directly update to the icculous source code-- nor should
>> we, unless we work at Bit Blot --
> 
> Since you seem to be unfamiliar with the history of Aquaria, let me help
> you out.  Bit Blot is a label created by Alec Holowka and Derek Yu for
> Aquaria; the two have subsequently moved on to separate projects under
> different labels.  icculus.org is (as I understand it) the website of
> Ryan Gordon, who handled the Mac and Linux ports of Aquaria for the
> Humble Indie Bundle.  The two are separate, unrelated entities.
> 
>> so we do our changes locally and send pull requests to Bit Blot (via
>> the mailing list, I suppose).
> 
> I'm curious where you got that impression.  I've been on the list for
> a while, and I don't recall Alec or Derek suggesting anything of the
> sort.
> 
>> What we, the contributing community, can do is:
>> 
>> 1) Make our branches easy to integrate.  This means making them
>> directly off the default icculous branch or other branches as much as
>> possibly. (Andrew Church, I am pointing you out as a bad example here.
>> I have had to untangle a bunch of your patches from each other to use
>> them in my own repo.
> 
> So let me get this straight.  You would:
>    (1) have me limit my changes to those which can be applied directly
>        to the original source, rather than building upon those changes
>        to improve the program further;
>    (2) force Bit Blot (or Ryan) to manually pull patches from my
>        repository; and
>    (3) burden them with the not-insignificant work of resolving the
>        conflicts between all those patches?
> And you suggest that's better than my standing offer(*) to roll up and
> mail any set of patches Ryan wants to integrate, in a form that can be
> directly applied to the icculus repository?  Just trying to make sure
> we're on the same page here.
> (*) http://icculus.org/pipermail/aquaria/2010-June/000170.html,
>    http://icculus.org/pipermail/aquaria/2010-August/000280.html
> 
>> We have opted to do #1.
> 
> Well, I don't know who in particular you mean by "we", but if you're not
> interested in using my patches, I certainly won't force you to.
> 
> Hope that clears things up!