Bukkit Development: Back on Track and Full Steam Ahead!

Discussion in 'Bukkit News' started by EvilSeph, Jun 14, 2012.

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    EvilSeph

    This announcement is mostly for the developers in our community as it provides an explanation for why we have been seeing little to no activity with the project and why pull requests have not been handled within a reasonable amount of time.

    As most of you may or may not know, we have been under a code freeze for the last two months or so to focus on improving the level of performance people were seeing from our product. Believe me when I say it's highly unlikely anyone is as frustrated as we are that we've been unable to move as quickly as we have wanted. I've had the team on my back every single day wanting me to lift the code freeze so we can continue coding to our hearts' content and I've been eager to get some commits in of my own or pull some PRs that have really garnered my interest.

    Unfortunately, for the benefit of the project I had to stop all development and focus all of our resources and efforts on addressing some critical issues we were noticing through frequent reports popping up throughout our community. Usually I'd opt to have a portion of the team focus on addressing the issues, while another portion would push forward with development, but it was clear that going that route would have just made it even more difficult to track down some of the issues people were bringing to our attention. It's hard enough tracking down a bug, crash or leak within static code...adding changes in while we were investigating would have just driven us insane and wasted our time.

    So, it was full steam ahead. We scoured every inch of our community to find even the smallest report relating to a performance issue and set off to investigate each and every one in the hopes that it would give us a hint as to the cause of the significant and sudden decrease in performance we were seeing. After it was all said and done, we finally got a Recommended Build out that fixed the issues. Sadly, shortly after getting that RB out our issue tracker was filled with reports of some crashing and duping issues (that may or may not have been directly caused by Bukkit). So, despite having just unfrozen the code, I re-instated the code freeze and directed our focus to addressing those issues. Having just promoted an RB, I did not want to risk having new, unproven code added to the code base while we were addressing the security issues since it might introduce new issues that would require another RB (believe it or not, we get angry emails, posts and feedback when we promote RBs too often...).

    Judging by some of the feedback I've received from developers, it is clear that the lack of response or communication on our part about the code freeze has left some developers annoyed and disgruntled. Unfortunately, the last time we communicated a code freeze, we had to deal with false and misinformed rumours spreading throughout the Minecraft community that "Bukkit is dying". Bearing that in mind, I was hesitant to write an announcement and chose to communicate that we were under a code freeze through IRC as much as we could, which avoided non-developers hearing about the code freeze but also had the downside of not reaching every developer. If the Bukkit community consisted only of developers, things would be much easier. As it is, however, we need to bear in mind that there are many different types of individuals in the community, ranging from Developers, to Server Admins, to GSPs, normal users and so on. With the current systems we have in place, it is difficult for us to communicate a purely developer-centric message without having a non-developer misunderstand it in some way.

    On behalf of the team, the project and myself, I sincerely apologise to you and every other developer who has been waiting for their PR to be reviewed and hopefully pulled for the delay, but - as I hope you can understand now - it was unavoidable. I would like to promise that this will not happen again, but honestly if I were faced with the same situation, I would make the same decision. Ideally, I would like to have a system in place where we could better and more frequently communicate project status purely with developers, but I'm not sure how to best go about doing that. If, for example, GitHub had an announcement banner feature that could be shown above all pull requests and the pull request list, we'd be set. But, as this is not the case, I'll need to come up with some other solution. If you have any ideas, I'd be happy to hear them - please leave a comment reply with your thoughts.

    With that covered, I'm happy to announce that I am finally able to and have finally lifted the code freeze. From this point onward, until we need to freeze development again, we'll be reviewing (and possibly pulling) PRs like crazy, as well as committing the work we've had on the backburner for the past few months. You have no idea how happy we are to finally have the freedom to code like crazy again.

    Thanks again for your continued support, patience and understanding. You guys are awesome and we would not be where we are without you!
     
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    Jamie Tees

    Will we be getting a pre release build of bukkit available? So then plugin developers can start developing for 1.3 ready for august the 1st?
     
  3. I have a question. How will 1.4 plugins API affect bukkit? Will bukkit be integrated in minecraft and there'll be plugins list to install on the minecraft client itself?
     
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    AdamTragedy

    Yeah, I would love to know when a bukkit release is supposed to hit regarding 1.3. My server has already been running 1.3 for a few days now and we are patiently waiting for a bukkit release so we can start seeing the updated plugins come back onto our server.
     
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    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    Expect a release no sooner than 1.3's release
     
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    Zach Hinchy

    That would be a bit unfortunate, considering the release version of 1.3 is already available as a prerelease (it's not an official update but it is 100% identical to what will be pushed to everyone come August 1st), with the explicit reasoning to give server owners and modders time to prepare. If a Bukkit release, even as a development build, doesn't happen before August 1st, then that kind of defeats the point. But since the main Bukkit people are part of Mojang now anyway and therefore probably had a say in the 1.3 release process, that'd mean we'd probably have a dev build before August... right?
     
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    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    The point of 1.3 is to give modders time to prepare, which is exactly what the modders on the Bukkit team are doing: preparing, getting CB ready so you can have a release shortly after 1.3 is officially released.
     
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    hawkfalcon

    The reason they did a pre release is so Bukkit could (hopefully) be able to make a rb before it comes out.
     
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    Jamie Tees

    Kinda sucks that you won't give out a bukkit pre release do mod authors can update their plugins...
     
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    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    1.3 pre release was put out so that mod authors could update their mods. CraftBukkit is one such mod. They are taking full advantage of this week to ensure that CB is ready as quick as possible. When it's out, CB plugin authors can update their plugins (if necessary, which it isn't going to be for any authors using just the Bukkit api). The 1.2.5-R5 release ensures that everyone has an RB with the latest API they can build against.

    Nobody's holding back a 1.3 CB release. They're working on it, taking advantage of the week given to them before 1.3 goes out to all clients.
     
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    Jamie Tees

    Thanks mbaxter, so with 1.3, plugins aren't likely to break?
     
  12. Offline

    TnT

    We are making no breaking changes in the API. Provided plugins use the API, they are fine. If plugins override CraftBukkit methods, they may break just as they may break with every update, but that should be taken up with those plugin makers.
     
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    Jamie Tees

    :) Thanks, nice to know
     
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