[ODE] some quick notes on 0.6...

[Jean-Sebastien Guay]

Just inserting my point of view here, might not be appropriate but I think it's
been overlooked...

> I'm simply suggesting that a primitive that limited has no business in the
> main distribution.  It makes for an incredibly-poor "out of the box
> experience", no pun intended, when someone downloads ODE and runs
> test-boxstack for the first time.  Few will bother to dig through list
> archives and manuals after an experience like that.

ODE being an open source project, the only way things will improve quickly is to
get the code for experimental features into the hands of the users. Not everyone
wants to get the SVN version, so I think having an official release with the
code in it is a good way to make use of the "large number of eyeballs" effect.
ODE is very useful library in which most features people use are very usable
and stable. Some features are experimental, but this way, as time goes on, they
will mature.

Also, since it's a very small project, we can't expect a team of "release
engineers" to go through the code just before a release and strip out anything
that's not ready for prime time. Keeping one branch (with possible tags)
simplifies things a lot for the developers and for the people (person) managing
the release cycle. There was a discussion about this a short while back. In this
case, I think it's a good compromise.

As for the heightfield collider, I agree it should be in the trunk instead of a
patch. I personally don't have the expertise to integrate it. Someone will have
to contribute some time to do it. It's an open source project; that's how things
work.

My 2 Canadian pennies.

J-S
--
______________________________________________________
Jean-Sebastien Guay     jean-sebastien.guay at polymtl.ca
                         http://whitestar02.webhop.org