#bukkitlog

[ironseph]

BukkitLog 1.7: CraftBukkit 1.7.2-R0.3, Minecraft 1.7.4 update

BukkitLog is a series I'm trialing on behalf of the Bukkit Project to determine if our plugin developers and GitHub contributors will find developer-centric communications useful. Articles will be of variable length and purely directed towards developers. In this particular article, I'm also experimenting with providing ETA-esque information, which is something we've shied away from for good reason.

As I covered in a recent article, I've been pushing the project to release promoted builds more frequently to address a challenge we face from day to day: Minecraft's unpredictable release schedule and ramped up development pace (something I would like to eventually cover in detail in another article). Unfortunately, due to a recent trend of adding new or further complicating old commands to Minecraft, we hit a bit of a snag due to the way we handle commands.

Thankfully, now that we have our new Minecraft command handling in, we're well on our way to a CraftBukkit 1.7.2-R0.3 and future updates will no longer be blocked on the requirement to add commands to Bukkit before they become usable. With our new proposed system, we'll be able to offer Bukkit and Mojang versions of each command, as well as the ability to always use the Mojang version of the command for CommandBlocks.

Following that, we've been working on updating to 1.7.4 and, as such, I'll be placing the project under a (hopefully) short code freeze while we complete that work. Unlike the previous update, I do not foresee any issues arising with our tools that would necessitate the need to hold back the updating of our mc-dev repo. Once the update is completed, I'll lift the code freeze on the project and we'll continue processing PRs as we have recently been doing.

I'm really happy that PRs are moving again and our awesome community is able to contribute directly to the project. Even so, there is still more work for me to do before I am able to get our handling of PRs to an acceptable level of efficiency and efficacy that I will be satisfied with. In the case of this update specifically: I was forced to redirect and focus resources on solving the blocking commands issue mentioned above (and detailed in the previous article), unfortunately resulting in other aspects of the project halting. There is definitely a lot to be said on the challenges we face that have led to our poor PR handling and I hope to be covering this topic in future articles.

Thanks for your continued support and your welcomed patience in this matter. I want to fix our PR handling for good and hope that, once I do, you'll give contributing to Bukkit another go :)

Leave a comment if you've found this communication useful as I’m trying to determine if it is worthwhile to dedicate time and resources into not only this series, but also potentially exploring a more official developer-centric means of communication as a project for Bukkit. BukkitLog should be an extremely powerful tool for communicating important messages to the awesome developers in our community and is something I fully intend on using to notify you of code freeze status, how an update affects you, etc.

[ironseph]

BukkitLog 1.7: mc-dev update delays

BukkitLog is a series I'm trialing on behalf of the Bukkit Project to determine if our plugin developers and GitHub contributors will find developer-centric communications useful. Articles will be of variable length and purely directed towards developers.

Minecraft 1.7 has been one of the more challenging updates for the Minecraft community to adapt to. I'm not aware of any mod development group that didn't have issues getting their tools to work with the update and Bukkit is certainly no exception. As was probably the case with other groups, a lot of the delay faced with our 1.7 update can be attributed to getting our tools to work to our liking.

In the early days of the project, we were forced to hold back on publishing our mc-dev updates since some projects were stealing our work and claiming it as their own. Thankfully, this is no longer the case and we now try to get mc-dev updates out as soon as possible so our awesome community of developers can help us reach a promoted state faster. Unfortunately with the 1.7 update, we ran into some issues with our tools that we had to solve and it resulted in some confusion as to the state of our build system.

Now that we've completed the audit of our build system and are confident and satisfied with the results of it, we'll be releasing the 1.7 mc-dev update shortly and resume working closely with you guys to add support for the new goodies 1.7 has to offer.

Thanks for your patience and understanding in this matter and I look forward to seeing what you guys come up with once we get most of our 1.7 support in.

Leave a comment if you've found this communication useful as I’m trying to determine if it is worthwhile to dedicate time and resources into not only this series, but also potentially exploring a more official developer-centric means of communication as a project for Bukkit. BukkitLog should be an extremely powerful tool for communicating important messages to the awesome developers in our community and is something I fully intend on using to notify you of code freeze status, how an update affects you, etc.

[ironseph]

BukkitLog 1.7 - Emphasising a Strong Foundation

BukkitLog is a series I'm trialing on behalf of the Bukkit Project to determine if our plugin developers and GitHub contributors will find developer-centric communications useful. Articles will be of variable length and purely directed towards developers.

The Minecraft 1.7 update has definitely been one of our most involved and complicated updates yet, with most of the Minecraft server's code touched and a large amount of refactoring having taken place. As a result, I decided to place our project under a semi code-freeze, focusing only on ensuring stability, in an effort to build a strong foundation before we began making additions to our code. This is also why we've been prioritising update related and stability-fixing pull requests.

The good news is that, judging by the activity on our bug tracker, we've managed to address many of the stability issues discovered and have begun to slowly thaw out the code to allow for non-critical bug fixes/code additions. What this means for contributors is that we've reached a point where we're relatively happy with the stability of the server and will be looking into PRs that address non-stability-centered issues.

For the plugin developers in our community, this semi code-freeze unfortunately means that we've likely not even begun work on updating the API, so depending on the state of the API is still not recommended. Minecraft 1.7 introduced a lot of new or changed concepts that will likely affect the behaviour of our API and probably result in API breakage.

Leave a comment if you've found this communication useful as I'm trying to determine if it is worthwhile to dedicate time and resources into not only this series, but also potentially exploring a more official developer-centric means of communication as a project for Bukkit. BukkitLog should be an extremely powerful tool for communicating important messages to the awesome developers in our community and is something I fully intend on using to notify you of code freeze status, how an update affects you, etc.

[ironseph]

BukkitLog: Developer-centric Communications

As a large and popular Minecraft server modification, Bukkit is faced with an interesting problem. What started out as a drive to create the quintessential Minecraft plugin development community and project has morphed into more of a consumer-oriented product instead. With this change in dynamic, we are presented with a new challenge: whenever I communicate with the community, I have to now keep the wide and varying audience we have in mind. Simply put, different groups need and respond better to different messages. For example: Server Admins prefer release, update and PSA/security announcements, while Developers are more concerned with API changes, project status and technical write-ups.

Due to the size, presence and purpose of the project, our target audience for articles posted on the front page of bukkit.org tends to be more Server Admins than anything, leaving us without a proper location to communicate developer-centric notices to the Developers in our community. Although GitHub would be the best platform for us to achieve this, unfortunately it doesn't provide us with the facilities to achieve what I want. Ideally, GitHub would have a configurable notice system like the one XenForo provides where I could put up short, useful announcements regarding the state of the project (for example, whether or not we're under a code freeze).

Since this isn't the case, I've decided to trial a dedicated series on insightfowl called "BukkitLog" to hopefully address this. BukkitLog will likely consist of varying length posts communicating the status of the project and Bukkit developer-centric information. I plan to almost immediately take advantage of the newfound freedom and flexibility this series will provide us by posting the first of many BukkitLog communications in the very near future. If this new form of communication is well received, I'll look into putting in resources to get something more official in place.

In the past we've announced planned changes officially without giving the idea a proper trial run, often leading to initiatives publicly falling flat when they don't mesh well with the project. This is one of the reasons why I decided to reinvent insightfowl: it acts as the perfect location to experiment with ideas and have discussions around them and the impact they could have on the project before we needlessly pour official resources into them, on top of being a place for me to share my thoughts.

This is one of the many changes we have in mind and steps we're taking to improve the Bukkit project. Hopefully this explains some of the challenges we face with communication and begins to address some of the issues our fantastic community has with our project. Any feedback you have is extremely welcomed, please feel free to start a discussion in the comments!