Process of Adding Patchpacks to Trunk

[TrainLover]

So, I am wondering why it takes so long to add patches to trunk? Some patches require the manipulation of just one or two values on the source code, and the game is extremely stable. Good examples are changing the maximum values of ships/planes/etc. Those patches are not part of trunk. Therefore can someone explain to me what the process of getting added to trunk entails, because I have been trying to find out why, but I can't find any reasons besides: the dev's don't think the patch is stable enough, and therefore can't be added to trunk.

[kamnet]

There is no general answer for your question. It is all determined on a case-by-case basis of the patch.

Is a value changed? What value is changed? Why are we changing that value? Is that the most efficient way to address the issue? How does this affect the rest of the core code? How does this affect older save games? Can you ensure that this change is completely backwards compatible with saves from the original TTD and will never cause a single crash? If not, can you convince the devs that this change is so important that it's worth breaking all backward compatibility for?

[_dp_]

As far as I can tell, in works like this: every year on 1st of April devs select random patch, merge it and release a new version

[andythenorth]

The game is developed actively, but at a very low activity rate. There are only a handful of developers committing in the last couple of years, and they have many other obligations and interests.

There isn't any formal process. There's no meetings, no committee etc. There's a tradition of releasing a stable version April 1st, but otherwise there's no release schedule or roadmap.

A dev with commit rights will sometimes pick things up because they're interesting or useful.

Where a patch solves a specific, reproducible issue, the best chance is probably posting a ticket to bugs.openttd.org (Flyspray). Sometimes there's a trawl of Flyspray for useful fixes that look complete.

The dev forum on this site is the other place patches are sometimes picked up from.

Polite discussion on #openttd irc channel occasionally gets a patch looked at, but depends on the day, and who's in the channel and whether they're in a mood to look at OTTD stuff