Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 5832
Joined: Thursday, 10th February 2011, 18:30
Dev Wiki vs. IRC vs. Tavern for Discussion
Relevant dev wiki topic is here.
Part of the chatter on the Interview with Dpeg thread, and in fact part of the interview itself (brought up by an interviewer) is that there is an apparent greater distribution of concepts and the discussion thereof without appropriate coordination. This thread is an attempt to put a handle on coordinating those efforts and I would love others to become active in the debate. This means YOU if you are reading this.
Popular ways to chat about DCSS Development
You have developers who are always accessible via the IRC, including some who only are.
You have developers and designers who use the wiki for coordinating and some who likely do not.
You have developers and designers who use the mantis bug tracker (likely all).
You have developers and designers who chat on the Tavern.
You also have some developers apparently only accessible via the mailing list.
And you have (if I am to understand) some who only use the SA forums.
That's 6 separate locations. I'm sure there are more. I'm not suggesting to get rid of any of them, but in my time as a developer/designer for another project, our project fell apart when the consistency of use for ideas and concepts became uncoordinated due to one developer's dislike of webpages, another's mistrust of forums, another's inexperience with using a wiki, another's insistence on using his experimental proprietary forum software (which was horrible), etc.
I see potentially the same thing happening here.
CHATTER ON THE DEV WIKI
Use of the developer wiki fell low for a while, and I understand that was an attempt at dpeg to organize everyone to use it, but due to the overall initial uncoordination of the beast, it became a huge turnoff. It has recently become more active and that is awesome. One major problem with keeping chatter/discussion on The Dev Wiki is that the Wiki software being used focuses on categorical organization rather than discussion. Example: The software for Wikipedia (MediaWiki ?) has a separate discussion page per page created; the DokuWiki software for the DCSS Wiki does not.
This causes posts of chatter to the DCSS wiki to become unmanageable and require eventual additional work by others for page cleanup, especially when an idea or concept is enhanced or modified in such a way to makes the chatter irrelevant.
CHATTER ON IRC
I'm not experienced enough with IRC to even discuss that portion or how decisions and directions are made, coordinated, and recorded through it. JPEG does an excellent job citing the problems with IRC in her post below.
CHATTER ON TAVERN
The only downsides I see to using the tavern are (1) some backwards luddite developer refusing to use the internet (it's happened!) (2) unnecessary input from trolls like myself that can be resolved via diligent moderation.
CONCLUSION
While I understand any major patch or feature is truly up to the desire and time of a given interested developer, I want to help you organize this process so that comments or ideas about similar things aren't strewn about lost in either (1) the forum (2) somewhere in the depths of a wiki page (3) a comment in a mantis bug (4) lost in the scroll of IRC (5) in a random e-mail.
Did I make a lame complaint? Check for Bingo!
Totally gracious CSDC Season 2 Division 4 Champeen!