So there I was a few weeks ago, surfing the web, when I came across
Eric Raymond's paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
(http://sagan.earthspace.net/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). I
think it's a great paper and I decided it would probably be a good
idea to try developing Circle as a bazaar project for a while.
Coincidentally, it was brought to my attention that people on the list
have been talking about doing the same thing lately - making a
bazaar-style project out of CircleMUD.
I know people have been frustrated by slow releases and slow
turnaround time on bugs; that's mainly due to the fact that other
things take precedence over Circle in my schedule these days. But I
continue to be amazed at how much Circle's popularity has been growing
*despite* the fact that I my development efforts have been few and far
between lately. So, as long as there are so many people out there who
love the code so much, we may as well take advatange of that fact and
open Circle's deveopment up in a bazaar style.
There are a few caveats, though:
First and most important: I still don't think Circle should deviate
from its original goal of being a solid, stable and relatively
*sparse* code base. Open source doesn't mean an open invitation to
throw every crazy feature in the book at it. At first I think that
the only things that should be added to the code are things that
can be considered "bug fixes". (At least until enough of 3.0 is fixed
that I can call it no longer beta!)
Second, just as important, is that one of Circle's most attractive
features to new MUD imps is that the code is fairly clean and has a
certain level of unity sometimes not found elsewhere. I'm afraid that
turning Circle into an open-source project may cause it to lose that
unity. But, hey, if the results really suck, I can always just revert
back to pl12 and restart building the cathedral.
The entire Circle distribution is in a CVS repository right now. I'm
going to work on setting up a system so that the repository will be
always be world-readable, so that the most current Circle snapshot
will always be available to anyone who wants it. At some point I'll
work on some way of giving some people direct access to actually
commit to the repository.
George has been doing a great job of keeping up with the list,
accepting ideas and fixing bugs -- the mailing list has just become so
actively lately that I haven't had time to keep up. So, I'd encourage
anyone who has general-purpose patches -- and, in particular, bug
fixes or ports to other OSs -- to submit them to George.
I'm going to be really interested to see if Circle becomes a huge
mish-mash of bits of code thrown together, or if it becomes a really
well balanced and solid piece of code!
-Jeremy
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