Greetings All, This email has been a long time in coming. The coding team has been idle for the last long while, and we're making some efforts to change that now. We're trying to wrap up some patches for Bahamut 1.8.5 and hoping to begin some significant development over the next few months. There are some big changes to how we're approaching things. In the past, we've run the Coding Team as a fairly closed unit - we worked on our development, took suggestions, and generally did most of everything ourselves. These days, we simply don't have the time to run things as they used to run. Changes are required - and so, along with some other things, we're changing our development process. This will result in the dalnet-src@dal.net mailing list becoming (I hope) a lot more active. With that said, here are some more specific details: Version Control: Git =============== After many years of subversion and, before that, CVS, we've decided to switch to git for version control. Git is a distributed version control system written by Linus Torvalds specifically for the linux kernel. It applies very well to open source development as a general statement, and it will provide some flexibility to our development methods. For more information about git, check out http://git.or.cz My copy, the master public copy for bahamut, is located at http://code.dal.net/bahamut.git Git changes how development happens. Learn it, it is generally awesome. Development Method: Maintainer ========================== This is a bit of a departure for us. Since the team as a whole doesn't have a lot of time, myself included, we're changing a bit of the approach. I will maintain the master git repository, cut official versions, and push changes onto DALnet as things progress - nobody else will really have access to the main tree. Keep in mind, using git, everyone has a full copy of the tree -- including all of the history. The only reason my tree is the main tree is because I say so, and everyone else lets me continue my delusions of importance. The method of getting a change into my tree will be as follows: 1. Submit a patch series ---> email, to dalnet-src@dal.net, a series of git-generated patches of the changes you wish to make. Its probably a good idea to send a precursor email to explain what the patches are and why, so we know. ---> include a git location for me to syncronize with your git tree. I should be able to git-pull your changes into the master tree in step 3... 2. Public review ---> everyone is encouraged to review and comment on the patches or series of patches ---> This may mean that your patches are rejected and/or changes are requested to your patchset 3. git pull ---> I will pull your changes from your git tree, and merge them into the main tree A few notes, to help with getting your patch to me in the best possible method: - Explain what you're doing, and why. Each patch should be either a single change, or part of a patchset of a larger change. - Commit log messages are important. - DONT combine several different logical changes into a single patch. If they're more than one old 'changelog' entry, you're doing it wrong. - Follow the coding format rules. This will be slack to begin with, but I'm going to be spending some time fixing this up over the next little while. Once our code is cleaner, the rules will be more enforced. Development Direction ================= Right now, we're going to concentrate on getting out version 1.8.5. Kobi has been working on a series of small patches to clean up a few outstanding issues in 1.8.4, and we should wrap this up within a month or so. These are small bugs and small enhancements. Afterwards, we have some general goals (like IPv6, client side ssl, etc) but no specific list. I'm open to suggestions, and would love to get more people involved. Anyone is welcome to contribute. I'm looking at you, dalnet ops people, to try and give us some suggestions of features you'd want. And perhaps to code them yourselves! I hope this will help breath some life back into the Bahamut community - I'd love to see this ircd become a major player again. We've always been one of the best in performance - we just have lagged behind in features for a while. Lets get this going again! Thanks, epiphani Coding Team Lead