Bukkit Development: Back on Track and Full Steam Ahead!

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!

 

It wouldn't be wise to tag EvilSeph while he's coding like mad due to the code freeze..

 

screw it announce it right here as always gives me something to troll loool
but i agree with comp_uter i dont know how this forum software works but vbull smf pbb most allow user groups
and you would be able to send a pm just to a certain user group

im not a dev just a lowly server admin and find it funny when all the non devs go nuts
maybe start a thread just for these people you could call it

(The Bukkit i dont know what the hell im talking about thread)

Thx Bukkit admins and devs for making bukkit the best m/c experience there is

 

It would not be best to leave even lowly SA's in the dark, either. While developers and add-ons are what make Bukkit so widely used, we and players are the ultimate end users. Not all servers are flowing to the brim with plugins, and still the largest part of the project and any server is CraftBukkit itself.

If there is something wrong, we should know. If there is a code freeze as such, we should know that, too. Communication restores faith within community, throughout all roles. No players -> No servers -> No developers -> No Bukkit. The same could not be said the other way around.

 

In all honesty I understand the current situation currently being undertaken, however, he's got more chance of seeing it when he's tagged, than when he isn't... The worst case scenario is he ignores it anyway. Either way, I am just giving my opinion, aforementioned in EvilSeph's post.

 

This makes me SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO excited! Maybe you guys can find a way to make new blocks without players installing a separate mod!

 

Nice too see tht everything is better i dont want my server going unstable , me and my admins have been working on ir for weeks now

 

Not possible.

 

Bukkit used to have the Plugin Developer usergroup on the forums, and announcements would often be sent to this group only. Fuck knows why they got rid of it.

 

this will never happen. Bukkit cannot add blocks with out the client needing the mod as well.

 

Thanks for the update! So does that mean you'll start development on Minecraft 1.3? Should come out this week or the next.

 

Your looking for a great way to communicate with all the devs. You should go on bukkit dev and see who has made a plugin and then promote them to a new rank dev that receives messages. Like they get nothing more just a new announcement feature for devs

 

Hmmm... I just wait. I believe you're serious enough to actually mention if bukkit is dying so I see no use in worrying about that. Rumors always spread by people with nothing better to do. Sad really that there always seem to be a bunch ready to scream "Wolf!" at the slightes thing...

 

I do not agree with this. DwD have custom plugins that are not submitted on Bukkit.

If my opinion counts I would have to agree with:

As Stated above, without the users no community would exists.



........


Also, great work on the builds. The users who rage about freezes are the users who do not understand the coding language. Stability is much more important than features.

 

http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/an-update-on-the-plugin-developer-tag-system.48718/
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/plugin-developer-tag-removal-feedback.48814/
It's beyond difficult to maintain a group of plugin developers. Between opting in, handling all of the TNT blockers, or finding devs, requring someone to actively cross-check lists, it should be perfectly understandable why it's not around anymore.

 

I meant that if any user can prove they have created plugins, not only on bukkitdev/plugin.bukkit.org, they obtain a usertitle.

 

Yes, I know. I was just getting a little over excited.

 

Every time i read posts by EvilSeph i wonder of his rich English. I'm sorry for offtopic.

 

Never compromise by trying to please the lowest common denominator.

 

In response to the OP, I have no problem with extended code freezes (though I'm not really a developer). As a sysadmin, it's nice to not have to update things for a while. Though on the other hand, since the API has been pretty stable for quite a while now, frequent updates aren't all that bad either. Most of the time I can just drop in the new RB right away for security/performance benefits, and then focus on testing plugin updates if any are available.

Stability, security, and performance are all very beneficial things to have, and I'm glad that you guys froze the code for a while to fix these bugs. Thanks for the hard work!

 

I think I was losing it... Thank god this was said on my Dad's B-day... good things come to those who wait

 

Thank you for the update! Can't wait to see what comes next!

 

Why are the dev builds no longer feeding the "Changes since the previous Development Build" section?

 

The Dev team gets enough grief for Bukkit related stuff (e.g. bugs, not releasing a RB soon enough). Why would they provide another point for their "loving" community to criticize by using improper English?

 

@Developers​

This announcement does not need to be in Bukkit+. As you may not realize there are soooo much more non-devs that need to know this information as well as regular forums users. Reporting this in a developer only section would be absolutely idiotic.​

 

With the 1.0.0.116 and 1.0.0.117 release I see a huge improvement in performance. In the past if I opened Windows Explorer while Bukkit GUI was running w/ the server started my PC would go to 100% CPU util and the it would become almost unusable. Now this is not the case, PC (windows 7 64 bit) runs fine w/ bukkit and craftbukkit.jar running in it (aka minecraft). Great work, James

 

This is not the place to ask that. This is about Bukkit, not MineCraft.

 

Sorry to have asked, but will bukkit be updating to any snapshots? Or will we have to go completely vanilla till August 1st? It would be nice if they could even start from the newest 12w26a snapshot. I do know that is asking for a lot, but it would be good to know if they were actually working on it...

 

Bukkit will update when Minecraft releases an update.

 

Bukkit never updates to snapshots. Most users can't use them. They change weekly, so Bukkit would never have any new features, they'd barely be able to keep pace with the snapshots. How long do you think it takes to "update Bukkit"?

 

Why not? Bukkit was hired by mojang