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To the Simutrans github organisation

Started by Mariculous, October 08, 2021, 10:39:20 AM

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Mariculous

Sorry, but I really couldn't find a suitable place for this in the forums...
It seems like James is currently on a hiatus and he's the only one able to accept commits to his repository, which is currently the official repository of simutrans extended.

To circumvent this issue for now and in the future, we (Well namely Freddy and me) would like to maintain a repository owned by the simutrans organisation.
For now, I have simply shared access to my repository with Freddy, but I don't want to take this project over or at least not alone.

Whoever is responsible for the simutrans organisation on github, could you please set this up, so I can pass my repository of simutrans-extended to the simutrans organisation?

Roboron

I would send a private message to sdog. He seems to be the most active of the organization admins.

I'm only a member, so I cant' add you to the organization.


prissi

I think you strongly overestimate the degree of organisation. I have for instance no access to the github simutrans, only aburch has access. I can just commit to it via the svn ... Thus I think only James has access to the extended git. Only the owner can invite collaborators, but the collaborators \can only contribute. The infrastructure around it is a totally different matter, I think there are more people. For anything hosted here (on Isaac server), the webadmin user can do something about.

Mariculous

#4
There is no need to access James repository.
As long as he's away, we can simply use a different one. That's the good thing about github (contrary to SVN, where it's possible but not that simple)

The idea of passing the repository to the simutrans organisation is simply to have an official place of the repository that does not depend on a single person.
I expected more than one person to have full access to the simutrans organisation on github though. If that's not true, there's indeed not a huge advantage compared to using a personal repository and permitting access to further people.

It's good to have all relevant simutrans projects in the simutrans organisation anyways.

Edit:The simutrans standard repository is not owned by the simutrans organisation. It's the personal repository of aburch. As it's just a mirror of the svn that's not a big issue anyways.
See https://github.com/orgs/simutrans/repositories

prissi

You can invite collaborators which can write and read. But to have more users review requests, one would need to set up an organisation account: on the team level that may cost money. https://github.com/organizations/plan (although is says at least for me $0)

It would certainly make sense to move the simutrans standard github there as well ...

Mariculous

Weirdly it shows $0 for me as well.
Anyways, most restrictions of the Free options do not apply to public repositories.
As we only maintain public ones, this shouldn't be an issue.

Roboron

There are more people with access. One of them is precisely jamespetts. Another one is aburch. But of course they don't use it, since their repositories are not on the organization, for whatever reason.

I agree that there are clear advantages for using the organization, and I've used it whenever I could. It's such a pity that we don't take advantage of it.

Matthew

Quote from: Freahk on October 08, 2021, 10:39:20 AMWhoever is responsible for the simutrans organisation on github, could you please set this up, so I can pass my repository of simutrans-extended to the simutrans organisation?

Just a thought, but would it be better to re-fork James Petts's repositories using the Simutrans account? James Petts' repositories have been the official ones for Extended up to now, so that seems to be the cleanest way to make the change.
(Signature being tested) If you enjoy playing Simutrans, then you might also enjoy watching Japan Railway Journal
Available in English and simplified Chinese
如果您喜欢玩Simutrans的话,那么说不定就想看《日本铁路之旅》(英语也有简体中文字幕)。

Mariculous

In the end it's just the same. The official repository will be a fork of James repository.
The cleanest way would be to transfer james repository to the simutrans account but we can't.

sdog

Is James alright?

He seemed active as usual just a month ago.

Fork or clone and push doesn't matter. Fork's just some github like hierarchy. In the end what counts is where forum and website point to.
James is also co-owner of Simutrans organisation. Main reason not to move it over to Simutrans on GitHub was that a lot of links would point to nowhere (or a stale repo).

We have currently 10 members in GitHub Simutrans. Five owners (Andz, Dwachs, Aburch, James, me). I will accept anyone I can match to devs or maintainers here on the forum. I will need to know your github account or an associated email. Just send in PM. Other owners may also add people.

Will elevate some immediately to owners. Might de-owner those who are inactive and don't care about it. Will also require 2FA in future.

I don't think we have limitations to our organization or costs as long as we keep it FOSS.

Mariculous

Quote from: sdog on October 09, 2021, 01:19:43 AMIs James alright?
Quote from: MatthewHello, gentlemen! As you know, it's been just over a week since Bridgewater-Brunel froze and we haven't had an update from James since then. The good news is that I have evidence that he is alive and well. The bad news is that if he is alive & well but not responding to messages about B-B, he may be on a lengthy hiatus.
We don't have much information as well. Maybe Mathew can tell a bit more.

sdog

Quote from: Roboron on October 08, 2021, 02:54:49 PM
There are more people with access. One of them is precisely jamespetts. Another one is aburch. But of course they don't use it, since their repositories are not on the organization, for whatever reason.

I agree that there are clear advantages for using the organization, and I've used it whenever I could. It's such a pity that we don't take advantage of it.
We discussed moving the repos to the organisation. However, we decided against as it would lead to umpteen dead links. Since actual development was not on Simutrans and aburch just mirrors it there wasn't all that much to be gained from team structures in any case.

Roboron

About "dead links", well, I remember the first time I tried to clone the svn source and it didn't found the URL the documentation pointed out (svn://tron.something). It's not the end of the world, you search for the new link and eventually old references will be updated. But I can understand not wanting to do it.

Mariculous

There shouldn't be dead links as the old URLs of the repository will redirect to the new repository.
It is recommended although not required to update links where possible to avoid confusion.

There now is a simutrans organisation repository of both, simutrans-extended and pak128.britain-ex

I have not yet checked who has access to these, and I'd like to setup a "no-push-to-master" rule, but in any case you should now be able to create pull requests agains that repository.
Any simutrans-ex dev is welcomed to use this repo at least until James returns.
When he does, it might be sensible to move his repository over, so that old links remain intact, whilst we still have control over the reposiory in case he disappears again.

sdog

I've sent and invite to Freddyhayward.

simutrans-extended and pak128.britain-ex require PR to merge to master.

I suppose we also need a pak128.britain-ex team. Who's innit?

sdog

There are still two elephants in that organization. pak128 and pak96comic are dead attempts to make SVN mirrors. We gave up about 7 years ago. Mostly because there was zero interest and difficulties we didn't find a way around*.

*Some .git files that were checked into the SVN that retroactively changed line endings.

prissi

pak128 is more recent on sourceforge. The mirror seems out of date. I can check it one can have a hook to push the svn to github on commit. However, it still badlz needs a maintainer ...

Mariculous

Quote from: sdog on October 09, 2021, 10:24:53 PMI suppose we also need a pak128.britain-ex team. Who's innit?
As pak128.britain-ex is the quasi standard pak of simutrans-extended, developement is closely tied to it.
Thus, practically most simutrans-ex contrubutors did also contribute to pak128.britain-ex.

Matthew

Quote from: Freahk on October 09, 2021, 01:43:33 AM
We don't have much information as well. Maybe Mathew can tell a bit more.

I have very little information other than the above and I don't want to source that out of respect for James' privacy. But he is choosing not to engage with Simutrans at the moment; I don't know for how long.

Everyone involved with Simutrans goes on hiatus from time to time and given that James has contributed so much of his time and money for so long, he's long overdue a sabbatical. In recent years, he's hardly played the game, so perhaps it just started to feel like work. He might be back tomorrow, but perhaps a long break will help him to return with fresh enthusiasm and ideas. His consistent commitment to open source solutions means that the Extended projects can continue.
(Signature being tested) If you enjoy playing Simutrans, then you might also enjoy watching Japan Railway Journal
Available in English and simplified Chinese
如果您喜欢玩Simutrans的话,那么说不定就想看《日本铁路之旅》(英语也有简体中文字幕)。

Dwachs

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and maggikraut.


prissi

SInce SImutrans-experimental is already is a fork of aburch/simutrans and is in simutrans organization, standard cannot go there anymore, it seems. I get an error message, when trying to fork it. Either there has to be a Simutrans-Extended organisation, or standard has to stay as it is in the SVN, or someone with more git skills than me can create a fork of aburch/simutrans there.

THLeaderH

#23
Splitting the simutrans organization into simutrans-standard organization and simutrans-extended organization would be the simplest way.
Since the contributors for these two repositories are quite different, splitting the organization makes sense.

The theoretical best way would be duplicating the repository for simutrans-extended. I think simutrans-extended does not have to be a fork of aburch/simutrans anymore, thus duplicating jamespetts/simutrans-extended in the procedure of this guide would make sense.
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/duplicating-a-repository

Mariculous

#24
Quote from: prissi on October 24, 2021, 11:59:10 AMSInce SImutrans-experimental is already is a fork of aburch/simutrans and is in simutrans organization, standard cannot go there anymore, it seems.
Oh yes, that's a github restriction I really forgot about :(

As there are not yet many links to simutrans/simutrans-extended, I agree with THLeaderH that it's a good idea to split the company into two companies now.
This will also fix the same issue on all paksets joining the organisation, except from those maintaining both versions in the same repository (pak192.comic)

Any opinions on this?

prissi

It strongly oppose creating something named "Simutrans-Standard", this naming convention was invented by experimental. Experimental is still based on vanilla Simutrans like OTR. Therefore, I think the repo should be rather Simutrans/simutrans for the origin.

Maybe it can be after the cloning and adding of simutrans/simutrans-experimetnal it can be added back on the command line as upstream?

Unfortunately team has become now $4 while it was free two months ago ...

Mariculous

Quote from: prissi on October 25, 2021, 12:24:06 AMIt strongly oppose creating something named "Simutrans-Standard"
Sorry, that was a typo.
I meant to move simutrans/simutrans-extended to simutrans-extended/simutrans-extended, so simutrans (standard) can join the simutrans organisation.

I have set up a testing organisation: https://github.com/simutrans-test
Seems like a fork of aburch/simutrans and an unlinked simutrans-extended can co-exist.
As forks are not a git thing, but a github specific concept, you can surely still interact with any simutrans standard or extended repository on the git level. That means pull, merge, cherry-pick and stuff like that will still work, but the "this branch is ... commits behind master" status nor pull requests between them wil work.

If unlinking extended from standard is considered the way to go, we need James to agree with this, so he can ask the support to unlink his repository from standard.

prissi

I would certainly like to hear his comments, as his workflow depends much more on github. In priciple, I could import also the svn into a new git repo and push that to github, if wanted, but then again one would loose the connection.

THLeaderH

Freahk, thank you for setting up the test organization. I like Freahk's approach which unlinks simutrans-extended from aburch/simutrans hierarchy.

Roboron

I also like more the approach of removing the fork status of Simutrans-Extended. Not only because I don't like the idea of splitting organizations, but also because it would also simplify things for me. Currently, I can't maintain a personal fork of Extended and Standard at the same time, I have to delete one of them first. That piss me off when submitting/testing changes for both Simutrans.

Andarix

I would appreciate it if there would be releases of Simutrans-Extended again. Releases can be better used and tested by a wider base of gamers.

Mariculous

I agree with the general idea of releases, but I am not sure how this can work in extended at the moment.
The issue is the lack of testers and feedback (bugreports). Besides Ranran and very few further, all of the bugs reported have been observed on the bridgewater server.
I am not sure how useful releases are whose bugs are not reported.

Andarix

It's not much different with Standard. Feedback has generally become very rare at Simutrans, if it has not always been that way.

But you can announce releases and thus enable the distribution among the players.

I also think that the little feedback here comes from the fact that Simutrans is very fragmented on the Internet.

Simutrans has a long fork list. But very few users have ever read here.
https://github.com/aburch/simutrans/network/members

And ultimately you also ask yourself whether the behavior of Simutrans / Pakset is an error or whether it is intentional. Since there is little documentation about how what should work, the evaluation is rather impossible for pure gamers. Even players who have been following Simutrans for a long time have problems assessing certain behavior.

And if documentation is available, you can often no longer find it because you don't even know what to look for.

an example
A few years ago it was installed that factories could increase their production. But I never found a documentation of what was intended and how it works. That was probably programmed by Knightly. But whether that was finished or not, nobody knows anymore.

So even if you want to document something, you can hardly find any information about it. In any case, it is very tedious and time-consuming to obtain information.

And so functions that have now existed have probably been forgotten.

Mariculous

#33
Yes, that's all correct, but introducing releases without ensuring that these are notably more stable than the nightlies and existing bugs get fixed seems pointless to me.
So how can this be ensured?

prissi

Do not put a major feature in and wait a monht. If nothing really bad comes up, make a release. However, a release needs usually a little more work (no DEBUG compile, check the translations, find the corresponding pak set(s) etc.) installer and so on.