ULX OpenSource Community Development

[spbogie]

Disclaimer(): I know I've been kind of disconnected from the ULX/ULib development process for a while now so this may seem kind of odd for me to be suggesting, but that's part of the reason I'm bringing it up.

We have all been very limited in the time we can devote to working on it as of late, and I don't see a whole lot change in that in the near future. Because of this, the project has suffered from a lack of any real improvement reacently. Bugs are getting fixed, but nothing new is really getting added. No outdated features really getting updated. The menus are a prime example of this. Granted, ULX has never been about the GUI interface, but this is the direction GMod community is going, and whole point of this was to provide the community with the tools they want.

I've been thinking about this a bit reacently and I thought I'd ask your opinions on it. What if we were to take ULX/ULib development tward more of an open, community developed, project. I'm not saying we completely change our approach to development, but lets start pushing the idea of community patches a bit. We have a community full of talented coders, lets see what they can do. When someone fixes a bug or develops a new feature we'll take a look at it, and if it's up to par we can import it into the main codebase.

Obviously we'll want to come up with a design document of some kind describing the coding standards people should conform to in order for code to be accepted, etc.

We can still continue to develop the way we always have, but we also have this great resource available, why not tap it and see if we can't relieve some of the burden.

I've already tried to sew the seeds of this a little in the reacent Users/Groups GUI suggestion thread here. We'll see where it goes.

Thoughts?

[Megiddo]

I think it's a great idea!

Unfortunately, I don't think it will work. I tried to move this general direction with ULib, with very little success. Although under different development circumstances, gNIX was also based off this basic principle. Garry's derma was also off the open-source principle (he wanted people to contribute menu stuff) and he ended up doing it all himself.

Soap box time!! This all leads to the logical question of... why are gmod programmers (myself included), in general, a selfish lot? We don't want to build off someone else's code and we don't want to contribute to another project (Again, this is generalizing). I think the answer is that most people are doing this to learn or for the practice, so we don't get much "professional conduct" as it were. End rant.

That's all my opinion though. I could be horribly misreading the situation . I'd love to attempt to try something like this, but do you have any ideas how we'd be able to get it to take off?

[JamminR]

I like the idea also, but feel it won't go as far as we wish.
Many throw ideas in suggestions, but don't care to learn, and/or don't know Lua.
We have included code base, or ideas, contributed by forum members.
Kyzer, Mr.President, few others I can't now think of)
I make sure to give credits in the change logs when this happens so others know that we like good ideas, and though not truly open code to all, are quite modular and inviting of those ideas.

I always hope people like Kyzer and Mr Pres stay around, but the 'good' ones only seem to be seasonal at best, once in a blue moon at worst.