[palito-dev] So then...

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

Well, it looks like there's not many prospective coders here, and Barrett's
main problem is not having time to do stuff ATM. Overall I'd say not good,
but not a disaster. People are still *interested* in Palito.

Even if we can't get any coding done at the moment for whichever reasons,
maybe we can still *discuss* things a little? Any problem with that?
If so, just say, please! :)


Firstly, I think it'd be pretty important that that last bit of news on the
Palito front page (not the Wiki! But I'll get to that...) gets fixed. People
will either suppose that the 9hells team have been flooded and thrown out
*twice* or get confused. People won't bother trying to contribute if it seems
like nobody is able to deal with their contribution because there's no
machines to work on...
If the problem's that people haven't time to work on the project at the moment
or are taking time off, there's nothing wrong with that (I've not done anything
on my main project for about 5 months, and haven't worked on IWR for a year and
a half), but it's good for people to be told what's going on.

Secondly, I know that there's a TODO file, but I'd assumed that Barrett being
stalled meant "There is a specific bit of code that I can't deal with", and
people who want to help often want to know if there's something immediately
important to do. What *is* the biggest problem in Palito ATM?
Personally, I could probably do some more bug-hunting, but some of the bugs
listed are a bit vague- like the one about readline returning "escape"?
Maybe we could figure out other things we could do?

Thirdly: Personally, I don't really like the idea of Wikis, I sort of prefer the
idea of one or two people managing a site and maybe taking content from people
and putting it in, like editors. *BUT* the Wiki is there now, and we have a
small group of people who could work on it, and I think the spam problem only
gets bad if the site is seen to be neglected. Supposedly a similar thing applies
to vandalism IRL.
So maybe people who don't feel comfortable coding can work on the Wiki? I saw
today that Nikosai had started an account to make some edits, which is cool,
maybe we can figure out what sort of other pages would be useful there?
I think we could do with
 -Instructions for how to play the "stable" and "dev" versions of the game
  (ISTR they're both different ATM)
 -Documentation for the Flush language (I know there's some in the existing
  readme files, but I think it could be better)
 -Explanation of how things like the network protocol etc are meant to work
  (there might be a big discussion on the mailing list, and some ideas get
  abandoned?)
 -Any other suggestions?

Finally, Barrett and anyone else from the original team: if you being busy is
just being *generally* busy, not anything specific (like work or university
or whatever), then some people recommend making just 5 minutes a day (or
every other day, every week, whatever) to the project, it can get things
going a bit.
But if it's something too important/urgent, there's nothing that can be
done about that except put Palito stuff off until later. The code won't break
in that time. Of course you don't have to do any if you don't feel like coding,
but you sounded as though you did want to.

I hope we can start some sort of discussion going here,
-Tomble
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