BukkitLog 1.7: CraftBukkit 1.7.2-R0.3, Minecraft 1.7.4 update
BukkitLog is a series I'm trialing on behalf of the Bukkit Project to determine if our plugin developers and GitHub contributors will find developer-centric communications useful. Articles will be of variable length and purely directed towards developers. In this particular article, I'm also experimenting with providing ETA-esque information, which is something we've shied away from for good reason.
As I covered in a recent article, I've been pushing the project to release promoted builds more frequently to address a challenge we face from day to day: Minecraft's unpredictable release schedule and ramped up development pace (something I would like to eventually cover in detail in another article). Unfortunately, due to a recent trend of adding new or further complicating old commands to Minecraft, we hit a bit of a snag due to the way we handle commands.
Thankfully, now that we have our new Minecraft command handling in, we're well on our way to a CraftBukkit 1.7.2-R0.3 and future updates will no longer be blocked on the requirement to add commands to Bukkit before they become usable. With our new proposed system, we'll be able to offer Bukkit and Mojang versions of each command, as well as the ability to always use the Mojang version of the command for CommandBlocks.
Following that, we've been working on updating to 1.7.4 and, as such, I'll be placing the project under a (hopefully) short code freeze while we complete that work. Unlike the previous update, I do not foresee any issues arising with our tools that would necessitate the need to hold back the updating of our mc-dev repo. Once the update is completed, I'll lift the code freeze on the project and we'll continue processing PRs as we have recently been doing.
I'm really happy that PRs are moving again and our awesome community is able to contribute directly to the project. Even so, there is still more work for me to do before I am able to get our handling of PRs to an acceptable level of efficiency and efficacy that I will be satisfied with. In the case of this update specifically: I was forced to redirect and focus resources on solving the blocking commands issue mentioned above (and detailed in the previous article), unfortunately resulting in other aspects of the project halting. There is definitely a lot to be said on the challenges we face that have led to our poor PR handling and I hope to be covering this topic in future articles.
Thanks for your continued support and your welcomed patience in this matter. I want to fix our PR handling for good and hope that, once I do, you'll give contributing to Bukkit another go :)
Leave a comment if you've found this communication useful as I’m trying to determine if it is worthwhile to dedicate time and resources into not only this series, but also potentially exploring a more official developer-centric means of communication as a project for Bukkit. BukkitLog should be an extremely powerful tool for communicating important messages to the awesome developers in our community and is something I fully intend on using to notify you of code freeze status, how an update affects you, etc.







