News:

Simutrans Sites
Know our official sites. Find tools and resources for Simutrans.

bug tracking

Started by ev0Child, November 18, 2014, 01:20:35 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

ev0Child

This is purely a query and not meant to criticize anything you do here. I have started a university project on simutrans and i'm just looking for some answers to back up my work, could anyone explain to me why the bug tracking is done on the forum and the community doesn't use systems like Trac or Bugzilla? many thanks and please don't take offence i'm merely doing research :) 

for anyone that is remotely interested in what i have found out about simutrans so far please take a look at my blog at http://kgoodram.wordpress.com/

thank again everyone

Combuijs

Some remarks on your blog:

"Simutrans is a clone copy of a game within the Tycoon franchise that was published by a company called MicroProse. "

(Do you mean Railroad Tycoon?)

I don't know what you mean by a clone copy, but as far as I know Hajo was appalled by the quality of the AI in Railroad Tycoon and decided to make a better one. He then created this game from scratch. So while it was inspired by Railroad Tycoon, it was certainly not a clone copy, far from it. The funny thing is that the AI never really developed in Simutrans...

"Simutrans was created using open source"

Nope, it started as closed source and that went on for a long time. Only when Hajo did not want to develop the game anymore Prissi took over and some time after that the source was opened. Simutrans spent most of its time as closed source!

"The Simutrans community seems to be run by a person that has a custom title of self styled benevolent dictator. "

While Isaac is indeed benevolent he is no dictator (far from it) and he does not run the community (He does host the forum though). The Simutrans community is run by ... eh ... the Simutrans community. Everyone can be part of that community, there are so called devotees on the forum that more or less run the forum and elect new devotees from members. There are a few developers that can modify source code and they elect new developers from contributing developers. The system of paks (play packages) allows for lots of different gameplaying options, everyone can contribute to these paks, but everyone pak has one or more managers. So your topic on governance misses the point I feel.



Bob Marley: No woman, no cry

Programmer: No user, no bugs



Sarlock

Quote"The Simutrans community seems to be run by a person that has a custom title of self styled benevolent dictator. "

While Isaac is indeed benevolent he is no dictator (far from it) and he does not run the community (He does host the forum though).

He does, however, have a very impressive chain of fried chicken restaurants bearing his likeness.

There is no de facto leader of the community or coders.  Certain long term individuals, however, do play a vital part in providing experience and guidance to the project.


Quote(Do you mean Railroad Tycoon?)

Transport Tycoon.  It certainly bears some resemblance to the game but has long since evolved far further than TT ever did.  I remember buying it in 1994 and enjoyed it thoroughly.


As for the bug reporting, we use the forums because it seems to work fine for us... it allows a wide range of coders and players a chance to suggest fixes for the bug (or maybe it isn't a bug at all) or at the least find the source issues as to why a bug is occurring, making it much easier to locate and fix.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

Ters

As for the bug tracking, I believe the argument was that it just creates a bureaucracy that we don't need, with priorities, version scheduling, assignees and what not. We don't prioritize or assign issues, they just get fixed by some passer by, or they don't.

Quote from: Sarlock on November 18, 2014, 03:41:21 PM
it allows a wide range of coders and players a chance to suggest fixes for the bug (or maybe it isn't a bug at all) or at the least find the source issues as to why a bug is occurring, making it much easier to locate and fix.

That's true for most bug/issue tracking software as well. Most open source projects have allow anyone to register and start creating issues and comment on existing issues. The drawback is of course that it becomes a second arena for discussions. I know of one open source project that made their Jira (a bug/issue tracker) read-only for non-developers, so that bugs had to be reported on their forum (which consists of a single board). What they use their Jira for now, I can't tell, but they still create Jira issues for relevant forum discussions and link them together for some reason.

By the way, this discussion is not a bug report, so it does not belong on this board.

prissi

Yes, the main reason was that bugs were mostly reported by non-programmers (because most programmer tend to fix their bugs anyway). However, this means there is a second system to be kept alive, where people have to register too (and which you have to amisnistrate etc) Bugtracking is something done for programmer from Programmer (or dedicated testers). Normal user (non-programming) should have bug reporting as easy as possible.

Even OpenTTD get bug reports in their forum, although they use a bug tracker (but somehow they never close bug reports ... )

ev0Child

Thanks people for all feedback, i will go back and revise my blog and rectify parts that i agree with, thanks to those too who commented on the bug tracking, and... i apologise for this being posted in the wrong forum.... my bad :)