One's Place in the World

It's hard to remember, given the way Angband is thriving at the moment, that a few years ago it was apparently about to die. The fact that it didn't was due to a desire within the community to keep it alive, and from that Andi Sidwell emerged as maintainer. Right from the beginning he had the intent to make Angband development more of a community effort - to steal an analogy, to move from the temple to the bazaar.

As a variant maintainer, I have been very much in favour of this movement. I have at times been very vocal in my views that various features need to be incorporated. And my loud-mouthedness on this issue has got me a place on the dev team, albeit a kind of special guest roaming correspondent place. Which leads me to the point.

I have promoted the whole AngbandBase thing, and my aim in V development has been to include all the features in FAangband that I don't want to lose on moving FA onto AngbandBase. Which is all very well, but with power comes responsibility. And I've now included features which are turning up bugs, and I'm in a "playing, not developing" phase and so the burden of fixing them is falling on the real dev team members.

So I guess this is really just a wordy apology, and thanks to takkaria, Magnate and d_m and others for a fine job. Although it's kind of a cheap trick to make a public apology that no-one will ever read...

Well, duh

After spending considerable time trying to work out how to manage keeping AngbandBase up to date, and how to make it an integral part of Vanilla, it turns out there is a simple solution. I simply had to make a branch of the official V repository called AngbandBase. Now keeping it up to date is as simple as 'git merge official/master', unless names change or new files come in.

And I suspect (but haven't checked) that incorporating it into a variant is about as easy - make the V repository a remote, and then merge the AngbandBase branch into the variant's master. All with the magic of git.

PS Well, not quite as magic as I'd hoped. Every Vanilla file deleted in AngbandBase causes a conflict in the merge; they then have to be forcibly removed and everyone's happy again. Is there a simpler way to do that?