Bukkit Project Changes and Improvements

The Bukkit project prides itself on being community built and driven. Unfortunately we were simply overwhelmed by the insatiable desire of our community to get involved with, and give back to, the Bukkit project. Moving forward, to address this concern, we have a few proposed changes which we hope will instill a renewed sense of community and getting involved.

Increased focus on JavaDocs and project documentation:
An API is only as useful and powerful as the documentation supporting it. Documentation is the foundation which developers depend on for correct and appropriate usage of an API. It is an aspect of the project which should have been given more attention from the beginning. Unfortunately, as is the case with most open source projects, we made the mistake of putting the importance of well documented code on the sidelines and, as a result, the usability of our API suffered. The JavaDoc Proposal Initiative is part of our effort to improve and complete our API’s documentation.

With this initiative we hope to improve the effectiveness and clarity of the JavaDocs. Ultimately, our hope is to eliminate the confusion faced by developers and reduce the frequency of questions submitted via IRC, forum posts and the bug tracker regarding the use of the API. Essentially, the JavaDoc Proposal Initiative will provide the community with a dedicated system to submit improvements to our code's documentation. We now have a separate repository (Bukkit-JavaDoc) where JavaDoc related pull requests will be handled by Sagacious_Zed - whose sole purpose will be to clean up, improve and manage our JavaDocs with the help of the Bukkit community. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, take a look at the Getting Involved page on our wiki for more information.

Quicker and improved pull request handling:
Bukkit chose to go the open source route with our API for several reasons. Not only is open source awesome, but we knew that there were many talented individuals within the Minecraft community that could help us evolve, mature and grow our project much faster than we could have ever dreamed on our own. Despite the impressions our past handling and actions might have given you, we see pull requests as an integral part of our project and a primary reason for choosing to go open source. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to handle the volume of contributions we were receiving and were not equipped to address every concern we had with them.

The main problem we encountered with submitted pull requests is that most of them did not meet our coding style requirements. The sheer volume of pull requests that were denied as a result of this alone was too large for us to handle. We simply did not have the time necessary to go through, respond to each pull request to point out where the author went wrong and then continue to provide follow up for the discussion. Though we did notice people in the community stepping up to try and help us improve the quality of the pull requests we were receiving, it was clear that they were lacking the guides, tutorials and resources necessary to make a significant difference trying to educate the community.

We've designed the Pull Request Handling Initiative to address these concerns. This initiative consists of two parts: a set of resources that clearly defines the project's requirements and expectations as well as guides and tips on successfully getting code into the project, and a team dedicated to managing and maintaining all the pull requests we receive from the community. The lack of sufficient resources has made it difficult to contribute to the project, and we hope that proper resources (and documentation thereof) will address this issue. The pull request handling team will consist of talented individuals hand-picked from the community that will work closely with the core Bukkit team to go through each pull request, respond to and help us handle them appropriately. Proper resources and a dedicated team will help to ensure that pull requests meet our high standard of quality.

While we continue to work towards launching this initiative, we’ll have EdGruberman helping us handle pull requests in the interim. His first responsibility will be to go through the pull requests in our queue, categorise and prioritise them, then work with the core Bukkit team to get them looked at and handled. Once we have the initiative ready to launch, his responsibility will then be to ensure that every pull request is looked at, responded to and handled within a reasonable amount of time alongside the rest of the Pull Request Handling team.

Thank you for your continued support and patience, we really would not be where we are without all of you. You are the driving force behind all of these improvements we've been working on the past 6 months and we hope that you'll be happy with the direction we're taking the project.

 

Great!

 

Fantastic. The team has worked really hard on bringing out these two initiatives.

 

Good work as usual

 

This is a well worthwhile project!

 

EvilSeph Thanks a lot for the time you've spent working on this. I'm really happy to see the changes you've made, and I believe this will really help and effectively address the current issues. I'm looking forward to seeing this in full effect.

 

Bukkit has come along way and i would hate to see it die. Also i believe the API Docs need more focus

 

So this is why there hasn't been a build in a while! Glad you're not giving up on the project.

 

"Increased focus on JavaDocs and project documentation:"

This is all I could have wished for and way more important than "oh noes u need to make new build NAO".
A good documentation is the most important thing to bring in and keep new developers and therefore help the community stay active. Thanks for your great work

 

This sounds really hard. I will donate so you can afford some beer.

 

Yay!

 

this stuff seems hard. Go, Bukkit team!!!!

 

Congrats @Sagacious_Zed at your new position

 

Nice!

 

This is exactly what we needed

 

Thanks for informing us with the Bukkit Project changes.
I really hope those Pull Requests will be given the attention they deserve from now on.

 

Please tell me you're going to make Doxygen better :3.

 

Seems legit.

 

Wow. Its like the Bukkit Team read the wish list I sent to Santa!

Hmm. Except I don't see a new machine sitting on my desk.

 

Looks like the docs will finally get documented