Since Frogatto & Friends moved from its own SVN repository to a Git one on Github, some people have got confused by the appearance of true merge commits in history due to them working on their master branch directly, pulling from upstream and pushing again. I don’t personally think that this is the best workflow, but for former SVN users it appears to be the most suitable transitional option.

But Git isn’t a 1:1 equivalent solution — and I won’t get too deep into that subject, so I’ll explain instead what the method that works best for Frogatto (without merge commits!) at the moment is.

$ git config branch.master.rebase true
$ git config rebase.stat true

The first line sets a configuration option that tells Git to try rebasing our local master against upstream after using git pull on it. The result of a rebase operation is that local commits not merged upstream are temporarily removed from history, the branch is reset to its previous diversion point, fast-forwarded to the new upstream HEAD, and the local commits are then rewritten on top, giving the user the choice to solve conflicts by hand as they appear, should they appear at all. The second line makes automatic and manual rebase operations to display a summary and stat display of changes merged in the fast-forward operation. I’m not entirely sure why this is not the default; normal fast-forwards and true merges (controlled by the merge.stat option) on git pull and git merge already do this.

See also git-rebase(1) for further information on what the rebasing procedure entails.

Once the configuration is adjusted with those two lines, it’s safe to git pull right away and later git push once everything is ready for committing to the Github repository for everyone to see.

For Frogatto’s SVN-inspired linear approach to history this means that merge commits won’t be generated and they won’t pollute history and confuse people who are not used to distributed version control systems.

July 2009 — work on the first iPhone port of the Battle for Wesnoth is announced in the official forums by Kyle Poole.

August 2011 — the iPhone and iPad ports of the Battle for Wesnoth have stagnated for half a year and support requests in the dedicated topics (iPhone, iPad) in the official forums are not being answered by Kyle, who last logged in on May 25th 2011, having posted for the last time on December 19th of the previous year, some time after announcing the release of a Palm Pre port. The SVN repository doesn’t display recent activity either. Meanwhile, Apple’s money-making platform marches on.

The truth is, after teasing the user base for a while with announcements of a forthcoming Android port, and invisible “progress”, Kyle seems to have moved on to “better” projects.

Case in point: Shadow Era.

The last thing I saw from him in his blog was the announcement of this new game from his company and frankly stopped paying attention afterwards since according to Dave he stated he’d be coming back to Wesnoth “soon”. That was back in May this year. His site is now suspiciously blank.

This lack of communication on his part while apparently having more success with his new release leads me to think he’s possibly not coming back to Wesnoth and we may have to start telling people in the forums to send their inquiries to his personal email address instead — which isn’t too hard to find in the web as Gambit discovered, mind you.

But what’s the legacy of this apparently abandoned port?

The Ideas section in the Battle for Wesnoth forums is in very bad shape right now, and despite the efforts of my trusty moderators, the root of the problem lies far beyond our ability to lock topics.

I won’t mention any names for obvious reasons, but a major behind-the-scenes administrative role in the Battle for Wesnoth Project (hint: it’s not Noy, it’s not Dave, it’s not me) once described several board sections including the aforementioned as “a place where all the noise can go to so that it does not hinder us too much”. This is not just one individual’s opinion and it shows; even when I was a user back in 2006 I always felt Ideas tended to be left aside by the development team.

Yeah, I know:

Q: Why doesn’t Wesnoth have my favorite feature?
Because we are building this game for ourselves, to suit our own preferences. We’re not building the game for you, in large part because this is our hobby, not our job; whether you like it or not is immaterial to us. You may wonder, then, what the point is of soliciting ideas, as we do on the forum. We, the developers, have certainly come up with many good ideas on our own, but our players often do as well, and generally ones we don’t think of ourselves. If a player comes up with an idea we like, we might implement it. Not because they asked for it, but because of its own merits as an addition to our game. […]

Of course, the extent to which a bunch of key developers can come up with ideas when they don’t even regularly play the game proper is debatable. The other side of the coin shows that users don’t really come up with good ideas most of the time. Most Ideas topics fall into one of the following categories:

• Frequently Proposed Ideas (FPIs) — which go in the opposite direction of Wesnoth’s development
• Good ideas that can’t be immediately implemented (BWH, from “been suggested before, we think it’s a good idea, hope to add it eventually”)
• User interface ideas (usually overlaps with BWH)
• Add-on and multiplayer server ideas (ditto)

FPIs can be easily handled by moderators following a few simple guidelines and the bulk of locked threads in Ideas correspond to these. The problem is that BWH entries are not correctly classified anywhere — not even Feature Requests in the Gna.org bug tracker are properly monitored and occasionally completely ridiculous entries get added there; others are forgotten and implemented by other people on their own without referencing the existing open issue(s), and there’s also a swamp of outdated issues that may no longer apply to trunk.

BWHs are also quite sad to handle because, let’s accept it, most game players have no coding skills and won’t mess with the source to contribute C++ or Lua code back to the game, no matter how prominently advertised the open source nature of Wesnoth might be. The Forum Moderators are deliberately picked up from the non-technical bunch so they don’t get overloaded with responsibilities, something that’s happened before and has resulted in a degradation of the forums’ service quality.

User interface ideas are an even worse terrain because Wesnoth’s GUI development has been largely stuck since 2008 with Mordante/SkeletonCrew’s new internal toolkit, GUI2. Pretty much no groundbreaking changes can be done until GUI2 is mature enough to support all the old features. It’s not very hard to create a campaign scenario with an absurdly long Objectives entry and watch the ensuing rendering mess — that’s just one example of how GUI2 is still inferior to the less flexible old toolkit in some ways.

GUI is also a tough matter because it’s easy for a single user or Wesnoth developer to propose an interface for some task, implement it, and later find out that most of the other users or developers don’t “get it” — this is an issue inherent to user interface design, of course.

Add-on and multiplayer server ideas are very hard to implement because they tend to require not just changes to the server and client code to suit our needs, but they also often involve new GUI elements, resulting in an overlap with both the GUI category, which in turn overlaps with BWH.

Gambit and I tried for a while to make people use topic icons in Ideas to mark BWH entries and the rare issues that get finally solved in trunk. This doesn’t work very well because other developers either don’t watch Ideas thanks to the predominance of posts in any of the categories described above, or don’t watch the forums at all.

I usually try to be optimistic about things, but I really feel like we core developers are alienating our own user base with this apparent lack of interest for communication. Don’t even get me started on the “new lobby” fiasco in version 1.8.0.

Thanks to a Wesnoth user (you know who you are!) who bought an order of the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for me last Tuesday, I finally had the chance to try the popular in-development Minecraft, thanks to the included trial that lasts until this Sunday 14th.

My thorough review of this game follows.