Super Mario Bros. X Forums

Hello again, everyone! Hope you all had a good Easter weekend!

Once again, I'd like to thank you all for your involvement in this process. Proloe and I have tallied up the nominations and discussed the candidates, and we have our top three picks among the people who accepted. But as I mentioned in the Beta 5 release thread last week, Rednaxela and the release volunteer need longer to make the hotfix happen; the repo transfer won't be happening until that's ready, and the meantime there's a couple things we want to get everyone's input on. We decided it'd be best to just reuse this thread for that, so here we are.

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First, ds-sloth proposed something we think is worth following up on: joint ownership of the repository via an organization account. We went into this with the idea that just one person would inherit the repo, but in retrospect X2 development was arguably at its best when the core team was deciding things together; perhaps we should formalize that this time around by leaving the engine in not just one capable person's hands but have it be shared by the previously-mentioned top three picks?

Dropping the top-down structure would mean less risk of repeating the situation we're currently in with a single owner who's no longer active, and if we were to choose ds-sloth as the sole owner this'd be the outcome anyway, so in that sense we'd be streamlining this process. also last week i saw pointcrow's april fools video in which he had his chat elect a government for his streams and they got two co-heads of commerce and the two presidential candidates became a sapphic couple so I'm choosing to take that as the universe sending me a sign

Up to this point, though, I have been talking about this whole process as if it'd have a single owner. So it's only fair to let people discuss and vote on this approach specifically, as well as give the candidates a chance to clarify whether they'd be interested in sharing the repo. As such, I've added a poll to this this thread and I ask that you please vote in it and discuss!

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The second matter is something I previously touched upon, but I'd like to expand on a bit: backup forks. To me, these would be designated forks that'd exist only to serve as fallbacks in the event something happens to the main development repository -- malicious code slips in through a pull request, the repo gets a takedown, one of the owners or the shared account gets compromised, etc. Maintaining a backup fork would be a matter of manually syncing the fork with the main repo on a regular basis (which could be anywhere from every week to every month or two), ideally after reviewing the new changes to make sure nothing seems off.

I admittedly didn't know whether this kind of thing is simple to set up so I checked with ds, and he assured me that it's something one can easily do through both the Gitlab/Github website and GUI git clients like Sourcetree and Github Desktop, especially if there won't be any unique changes in the forks themselves. So this would be an option for the people who mentioned their interest in helping but are concerned about being a full-fledged project lead or managing the main repo.

Maintaining a backup fork wouldn't preclude people from contributing to the main repo or making other forks with their own changes or additions, of course. But it would be an important precaution, and as I've said before, one I'll be taking myself before the repo is transferred.

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With that said, we're leaving this thread open again until the end of the month, so y'all have until the 30th (a little under one more week) to discuss the above and vote in the poll![/b] PLEASE DON'T NOMINATE NEW CANDIDATES, but feel free to express your support for the people who've been discussed if you haven't already and we'll update our tallies accordingly next month. And if you're a nominee/candidate yourself (especially if you haven't posted in this thread yet), you've now got an opportunity to update/clarify your interest (or lack thereof) with sole owner, co-owner, and backup fork maintainer as separate options.

Okay, so... I've been talking about this stuff for a while now in the Codehaus and SMBX Discord servers, but for everyone who hasn't been privvy to those posts, here's a quick overview of where we're at.

SMBX2 is an open-source framework built around SMBX, but not in the way a lot of popular open-source software is. Software like Godot and Blender use the bazaar model of development, with a public repository and communal contributions, while we've used the cathedral model: the main development repository is private but releases and the repos for compiled elements (the editor, the music engine, and LunaDLL/LunaLua) are open. In short, one can already take a clean installation of SMBX2 and make that the basis of a new repo that'd resemble the main private one. The things exclusive to the private dev repo are really just the website HTML, files necessary for releases (the changelog and scripts to generate the installers) and individual developers' experimental branches.

With that said, X2 dev is reaching its end under the current development team, with almost all of the core contributors having burned out, quit, moved on, and/or become too busy to contribute regularly. This includes Emral, who left the team early last year; Proloe, the current team lead and owner of the engine's Gitlab repository; and Rednaxela, the primary LunaLua developer. The biggest reason Patch 3 took so long to get out was that we were waiting on Red simply finding the time to finish ASM work that only they were able to do.

I'm currently serving as something of an interim lead trying to facilitate a final Patch 4 (or at least a hotfix), but frankly I am NOT qualified to take over the technical duties and responsibilities of the above people and I've been feeling ready to move on from basegame dev myself. As such, Proloe, Red, and I are looking to make sure the repository is left in capable hands via transferring ownership of the repo to a new project lead and/or making it fully public. The latter WILL happen if the former doesn't, but also if any one person is to inherit the project then we want to make sure the community is able to give their input on the matter.

The initial plan was to have this discussion in either the Codehaus Discord server, the main home of X2's development for the last three betas, or the SMBX Discord server, where a big chunk of the English-speaking SMBX community is. But with the recent rumors of Discord going public and its accelerated enshittification this year, the future of the platform is especially uncertain. And this is too important of a discussion to have in a space closed off from search engines anyway, so we're doing it here on the forums instead.

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Here's roughly what we're looking for: people are free to volunteer to adopt the repo themselves, nominate others, and vouch for existing nominees. Other discussion of X2's development and related subjects is fine, but I'd appreciate it if folks could post the candidate talk first and keep all other stuff as a separate paragraph.

Some additional notes:

• We don't want to just foist the repo on someone who doesn't want it, so in the end we'll only be considering people who volunteer or accept nominations from others. If you don't do either, we'll assume you're not interested.

• If you volunteer or accept a nomination but later change your mind or something comes up, please either say so in a new post or go back and edit that part of your post to cross it out.

• You don't have to be a current or former member of the X2 dev team to be a viable candidate. It helps, but there's a lot of capable people in the SMBX community who were never closely involved with basegame work.

• If you're volunteering without first being nominated yourself, I ask that you also nominate or +1 at least one other person.

• To be clear, this is not an election. The community's preferences will still factor substantially into the final decision, but it's not just a matter of who gets the most votes.

• Again, if we have no candidates by the end, the repo WILL become public by default. Even if it does get a new owner, though, they may choose to switch to bazaar-model development and make it public anyway! So there's a higher likelihood of the repo becoming public than remaining private.

With all that said, we're not trying to be hyper-formal about this stuff! If you don't want to be a repo owner candidate yourself, don't worry too much about the above notes; you should be fine just following the general example of the people that posted before you.

The current plan is to close this thread sometime mid-April; two to three weeks seems like enough time for everyone to say their part. We're open to keeping it going longer if necessary, but it'd be best not to drag things out too much -- ideally we'll be able to read through these discussions and make the final decision in time to transfer/open the repo with Patch 4's launch (or a reasonable time after the hotfix if P4 doesn't happen.)

EDIT:
The closure date is Monday, April 21st.