Fosdem2014

General information

This page is meant to somehow coordinate the small Wesconf taking place at FOSDEM 2014. That is everyone attending should please list him/herself in the list of arrivals and stuff like this. FOSDEM 2014 will take place at the first weekend in Febuary 2014, on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd.

• Fosdem - http://fosdem.org/2014/

Wesnoth Hacking Room

Wesnoth will not have a room of its own (though there will be the open source game dev devroom on Saturday where hopefully many Wesnoth devs will participate). Instead we will use one of the "general hacking rooms". So far it is not sure which room it will be, if we do it like the last three years, it will be room number 115 in the building AW1 (okay, new booklet is out, now it is AW1.117). Last year this was the smaller of the two hacking rooms and we had no real problem with conquering (and holding) the first row in this room. There were not too many power outlets, so this year at least Ivanovic will bring one multi-outlet power strip plus some extension cable (5m or something like this). Mordante will (hopefully) also bring a multi-outlet power strip and a 20m extension cable. There is no wired network, everything wireless (and sometimes rather/very unstable!). Beside this you should bring laptops since there are no computers available for hacking.

Short version:

AW1 - Room 117 (at least on Sunday)

Discussions and Results

We usually discuss all sorts of things at FOSDEM, this section is basically a (really short) summary of things that were discussed including their results. First are the discussions that were done "in plenum" with basically all attendees around. At the bottom is an area meant for discussions that were held in sub groups that not all devs might be aware of that were around.

Below you can find a list of things we discussed and that were done during FOSDEM.

GSOC 2014

Discussion if we want to participate in GSOC 2014. First question were possible mentors. Here is a list of the people who were around and somehow willing / able to take on students:

Willing to mentor a "full student":

• Fendrin
• AI
• Trademark

Willing to mentor a student with some other (mentors) support:

• Crab
• Mordante
• Thunderstruck

Proposed candidates to mentor who were not around to oppose:

• Shadowm
• mattsc
• timotei

Basic decision was that we would like to try to participate in GSoC. Now we "just" need to find ideas. Proposals:

• Eclipse UMC plugin (adjustments to new editor feature) (fendrin)
• Add-On server related tasks (Trademark)
• AI tasks
• Game engine and MP campaign support improvements (e.g. interface cleanup)
• Work on the ingame help
• AddOns for the editor (fendrin)
• Work on things helping the ladder community (competitive gameplay) without creating bad competitiveness in our MP server
• Better support for "extra resources" (to harvest / collect) to be usable for UMC creators in addition to the existing gold
• Check old project list for usable stuff

More ideas are always welcome. The details will need to be written and more discussion should take place on the ML, in the forums and in IRC.

SDL2 / OpenGL

Does the migration to SDL2 make sense? Reason against is that Debian stable does not support it (yet) but it is in testing. Mobile ports like iPhone / Android significantly benefit from it. Gamepad support is also improved. Valve hired the person who started SDL and is heavily pushing for it, too.

It will be a lot of work to really make it work. One interesting question is if we directly want to move our rendering engine for OpenGL. When moving to OpenGL we will probably have to touch the rendering engine anyway.

Moving to OpenGL will create even more work overall, but since it was talked about for ages this would be a good option to finally get to it. Yes, the early builds will not be as perfect as they could be, but it should be good enough for a start... Mordante already stated that he would be interested to look into it.

Next stable release

We want to participate in GSoC. This means we need to handle things a little differently regarding string and feature freeze. The proposal is as follows: 1) Get the last string and feature changes into git master until Saturday, February 22nd. 2) On February 23rd: release of "first beta" and branch off from master to "1.12 series branch". 3) Stabilization for 2 month in this 1.12 branch, in parallel normal development going on in master (but devs should focus on bugfixes where possible while Mordante breaks master with libsdl2/OpenGL changes) 4) Release of 1.12 at the end of April / beginning of May.

Server infrastructure

The old server costs more than $1500 a year. It is only used for email right now. This is too much which is why the contract will be terminated. All services which are still left on the old machine will be lost unless someone ports them.

Group Picture

No group picture was taken during FOSDEM 2014.

Previous Years

• FOSDEM 2013 wiki page
• FOSDEM 2012 wiki page
• FOSDEM 2011 wiki page
• FOSDEM 2010 wiki page
• FOSDEM 2009 wiki page
• 2008 wiki page, Forum topic (with group photo), Summary of FOSDEM 2008 results