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On Monday 21 March 2005 4:13 pm, Martin White wrote:
Very quickly, the point about mame was probably a bad example!
The page I found is quite old - it talks of an update fixing a problem but that update was part of KDE 2.2! The main website is clearer: http://x.mame.net/ http://www.mame.net/
The mamedev's are a fairly extreme example of how devs can keep things to themselves. I'm not aware of any public documentation on how any of the now massive program works
From just a few minutes reading the website, I can see why this is so. It is NOT to make things difficult. Quite the reverse, the current developers and testers appear to be protecting themselves from the floods of useless bug reports and patches that could overwhelm a large and complex project that doesn't seem to have a lot of developers. From my perspective, games are an unrewarding area of development because the amount of help available is small compared to the amount of hassle from users. The documentation is probably available, once you become part of the team and you do that by merit.
(exe file in the region of 25mb before compression) and it is largely macro based. All the driver files make little sense from a programming language point of view, hence the "wouldn't know where to start" comment!
You start, in this specific example, by continuing as you have begun: "How does one join? Note that you will need to have reported a few bugs prior to joining, we can't just add everybody who sends an e-mail." http://www.mametesters.org/faq.html .....We recommend that you try to get a general understanding of how the MAME source is structured. We don't expect anyone to know how to program or anything (though that helps), but knowing which games are in which driver is quite handy.... That is quite friendly, really.
The problem of not getting credit for something comes from the fact that (understandably) only certain people have access to the ftp.
But you submit patches to bugs via email, you can put anything you like in the comments in the patch.
Consequently i put a couple of new things in, passed the additions to the dev that i know who then submitted them and the work gets credited to them!
You only need to put in your copyright statement. You don't need (and should NOT expect) a proclamation on any public website as gratitude. Incidentally, have you actually read the licence for that project? It's not free software and it is not GNU GPL compatible. This has echoes of Robin's problems some time ago with another "open source" project that the main developer suddenly took out of open source. http://www.dcglug.org.uk/archive/2004/09/msg00046.html You should always put a copyright notice in and you must always read the licence thoroughly.
To be fair, there are probably hundreds of people that contribute to that project and it would be impossible to credit everyone - the code with probably grow massively for starters!
Not many projects have that many developers. AUTHORS is a simple file that is part of all GNU software and it's a good way of collating that information. Also, each individual source file contains the copyright info of the original author plus anyone who has made substantial amendments / additions - irrespective of the licence. These are all comments, there's no harm in producing thousands of lines of comments like these. GnuCash certainly has MASSES of comments. See the Doxygen output on my site for an indication. The html documentation contains 1,400 files and is 34MB! http://code.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/gnome2/ All that is generated from comments within the source tree - 1.6Mb compressed, 3.4Mb in the Debian binary i386 package. Comments, being plain text, are compressed really easily and it's no bother to have lots more. Honest. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.dcglug.org.uk/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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