[ODE] Proposal: ODE "unstable"

[Vadim Macagon]

I haven't used ODE in a few months, so I'm speaking from past experience 
and as such I may not be entirely correct. I think the major reason why 
things move so slowly or not at all sometimes is that the maintainers 
aren't doing a very good job of maintaining the project - because they 
have so little time to spend on it. So while moving from CVS to 
Subversion would be nice, and having an unstable branch could be 
interesting, it won't change much unless we get some new maintainers who 
have the time to review & commit patches.


Colin Bonstead wrote:
> It seems like there hasn't been much progress on ODE lately, despite the 
> fact that there are lots of people using it and willing to submit 
> patches.  Part of this seems to be because the maintainers don't want to 
> apply any patches that aren't fully implemented, or have some bugs.  
> Instead they go into the contrib folder, or don't ever get added.  The 
> problem is, very few people are going to bother applying the patches 
> from the contrib folder, so the bugs or missing features are never going 
> to get taken care of.
> 
> What I'm proposing is having an "unstable" tree too, which has all the 
> contributions in it.  People can build that tree, fix bugs, and things 
> can eventually get promoted to the main tree.
> 
> I personally submitted a patch for trimesh preprocessing way back in 
> June of last year.  Here's the mail:
> 
> http://q12.org/pipermail/ode/2004-June/013183.html
> 
> Nothing ever happened with it, probably since I only added support for 
> it to the ccylinder collider (although any collider that doesn't have 
> support should just behave as it always has).  I can confirm this 
> optimization does work since we're using it in Myst V.
> 
> While I'm throwing things out here, I might as well also suggest that 
> ODE switch to Subversion instead of CVS.  We've been using Subversion 
> here at Cyan for almost a year with no problems, and it's WAAAY better 
> than CVS.