Community-based development

This is essentially my plan to make Ultima development more of a community thing, since I’m no longer able to maintain the entire distribution myself (but have plenty of time to tell everyone else how it should be run) – feedback and suggestions are welcome, you know the drill... we'll put all this stuff into action once we've got enough people involved to run this kind of scheme, in the meantime things may be just a little bit hectic, but then again that seems to be normal whenever I’m in charge anyway. Martin Ultima (talk) 15:14, 14 October 2007 (CDT)

NOTE: Most of the information below is already horribly inaccurate and outdated, but nobody seems to have complained, and at any rate it all seems to be working. Dev discussions currently take place on this forum (special access required), contact me if you want to join the dev team and help out with all the new stuff. Martin Ultima (talk) 20:32, 4 December 2007 (CST)

Post all feedback on this forum topic.

Contents 1 Basic organization 2 How things work 2.1 Build team 2.2 Support team 3 Miscellaneous

Basic organization

We don't want an unwieldy bureaucracy here, but to make things simpler we can split the work among two main “teams”.

Build team: Maintain the actual Ultima Linux distribution Download and compile software programs Organize releases as you deem appropriate

Support team: Maintain the Ultima Linux Web site Answer users’ questions on the forums Add/update information on this wiki

Our preferred governmental system has been, and always will be, “Real Men”-style anarchy. That is to say, you’re in charge as long as you can stay in power, but either way it doesn’t matter because ultimately (no pun intended) I hold the gun. Neither team has absolute power, and both must answer to another two groups: Our users, and of course me.

These two groups do overlap, and they aren’t exclusive – basically any user can join in, and in fact we encourage everyone to since otherwise we’d probably never get anything done. No, there’s no paycheck, but there’s no obligation either, just pop in/out whenever you feel like it...

How things work

Build team

Most everything you need is included on the Ultima Linux source discs. Right now the latest version is 8.2b; contact me if you need a link. You will also need pretty good hardware – I’d recommend at least a 40GB disk, and 256MB RAM. At least one person must have a 64-bit processor, to maintain the AMD64 edition, but an unused desktop machine should be fine – you don’t need fancy high-end workstation hardware, and in fact I’ve never owned any myself. Patience is also helpful here...

Almost everything in the build system is scripted. You don’t need to understand C code, but you do need to know how to compile it. You do need to fully understand how all our scripts work, or at least pretend like you do. I can (maybe) help here.

That’s the part you’ll like. The part you won’t like is that I’m a rabid traditionalist – and even though I won’t be hacking much, I’m still in charge – which means you can’t just go off and add new stuff to Ultima Linux without my approval, and you can’t just strip out stuff or change the way things already work unless I personally OK it. As a general rule, I’ll add small things like FUSE and video DVD support if enough users like them, or if I use them myself, but bigger stuff is more likely to remain optional. Do not violate this commandment:

Thou shalt not change ultima-artwork, remove multimedia or gaming support, and absolutely under NO CIRCUMSTANCES art thou to add any more bloody discs. Seriously. 715MB’s the limit, especially on the LiveCD, since that’s as high as my own burner allows. I don’t like DVD ISO’s, and yes, I’m already annoyed enough that we’re up to eleven discs.

Anyway, if in doubt post a poll on the releases forum, that way you can check it by everyone else before messing with stuff yourself.

Support team

This is actually the more difficult part, in my opinion. You don’t need any fancy hardware for this one, but you do need a good Internet connection and probably a few special passwords and stuff to edit various things, the latter of which I can provide. Your job is to maintain the horrific mess that is the Ultima Linux homepage, especially whenever the build team puts out any major updates to the Ultima code. In order by priority, give or take:

1. Answer users’s questions on the forums. I think this is the longest part, and the most unpredictable as well. Fortunately our elite team of Demigods has handled this very nicely in my more or less absence, maybe it’s time for some promotions... ;-)
2. Maintain the documentation on the wiki. Right now the whole thing’s a mess, and pretty much all of it’s my fault, but that’s beside the point. Write new documentation – we badly need it – and maintain the stuff that’s there too – it needs work.
3. Update the main Ultima Linux site. There aren’t that many pages on there – the only two you really need to worry about are the “Get Ultima!” page and screenshots; everything else is on the forums or wiki.
4. Hand out promotions like there’s no tomorrow. Optional but highly recommended, since we have to keep our silly traditions going somehow.

As a side note, you do need to know XHTML to edit the main site, and a bit of PHP wouldn’t hurt either, particularly whenever we get around to overhauling Ultima Central...

Miscellaneous

Nothing right now. I’ll find something to nit-pick about later.