TripleA development

[TheDog]

@frigoref
I didnt know what a normal MD file was so I googled it.

The file format is 'md', which stands for Markdown documentation. It is a lightweight markup language that can be easily converted to text.

GitHub still does itself no favours.

On a positive note I do use github to help Devs, but I treat it like a forum post,
my greatest contribution is;
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/7819

[frigoref]

@lafayette I am not quite sure how to adjust the current page.

• Map Admin is the Map Maker as far as I can see.
• QA is not a proper name. How about 'Release Tester'?
• The role term should reflect that it is an active component. 'Community' or 'Project' are reflecting more a passive association. Therefore, I would vote to keep 'contributor role' as the role term.
• I would definitely want to keep a proper name. We are missing currently a clear structure and for new community members it is difficult to see how they can contribute to the project. Defining roles gives guidance for new members and also identification for existing members. Furthermore, the role lables indicate who is supposed to do what and this separation of concerns is helping to give a community spirit.

[LaFayette]

@TheDog , just a few responses to what you posted:

The TripleA forum is ideal for offering opinions and thrashing out ideas and so others can agree or disagree.

It is actually far easier to comment on a pull request than it is to offer one or offer other changes. Because comments are in-context, notably they can be specified to the specific lines and can be resolved, it is far easier to track a multi-facetted conversation on a pull request. Forums are actually really bad at this, as soon as a thread has more than 2 or 3 topics, it is difficult to manage them. Further, any topic and conversation creates more content, contrast this with well organized discussion threads that are resolved (and so the amount of content is reduced as consensus is reached vs the other way round).

Then you as the original owner of the document make the changes, as I dont feel qualified

Once an item is merged, the owner is the 'TripleA' organization, there is no actual explicit personal ownership. In other words, it's not my code, it's TripleA's code and documentation.

[LaFayette]

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

but I am genuinely interested in what prevents you from using the link to make a pull request to contribution page, but you are still writing - even some extensive - posts here about what should change?

I think this is simply inertia and the conversation having started here. I'm pretty lazy, why click a link when I can just open a reply button? It's not a convincing answer, but I think that's all there is to it on why we are still discussing here the issue.

[LaFayette]

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

Map Admin is the Map Maker as far as I can see.

They are actually quite different. Map admin's have write access to every map repository while a map maker has write access to only the maps they have published. Map admins do XML fixes and other maintenance activities, they categorize maps, remove broken maps, etc..

QA is not a proper name. How about 'Release Tester'?

Can you elaborate why 'Quality Assurance' is not a proper name? 'Release tester' is not super proper either though as we want this kind of testing to be happening almost all of the time. There is a lot of manual testing that needs to be done after every single change, the need does not scale at all, but nonetheless we need people manually checking TripleA very frequently. Developers should be doing this very thoroughly, though there is too much ground to cover to always catch everything and hence the backstop.

For releases, there is more emphasis on this kind of testing to find any issues before we do a release. We had a formal 'QA' group for a while but it somewhat fizzled.

The role term should reflect that it is an active component. 'Community' or 'Project' are reflecting more a passive association. Therefore, I would vote to keep 'contributor role' as the role term.

I would definitely want to keep a proper name. We are missing currently a clear structure and for new community members it is difficult to see how they can contribute to the project. Defining roles gives guidance for new members and also identification for existing members. Furthermore, the role lables indicate who is supposed to do what and this separation of concerns is helping to give a community spirit.

I can generally agree to the above points.

[LaFayette]

Re: roles, I think there is some confusion as the developers, specifically the maintainers, have often assumed every role there is. For example, map admins previously did all of the source code work to add maps and received maps as attachments to forum posts. They managed updates this way as well. The responsibilities of the role are less today than before due to available automation in github compared to those source forge days of yore.

The current map admins can be found here: https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins/members. I don't think the concept has taken off very well, we mostly have developers on that team.. It is a goal for TripleA to try and distribute as much workload as we can so we avoid further cases of individuals leaving or taking a break and bringing the project to the halt. Your work here @frigoref should help that problem quite a bit.

[frigoref]

@lafayette The link https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins/members is not working for me. Does the github user need permissions to view the org details?

[frigoref]

@lafayette
Thanks, I understood the difference between map admin and map maker.
"Quality Asssurance" is already better than "QA", but not very expressive. Maybe just "Tester"?

[frigoref]

@lafayette thanks for your feedback. Do you see any way to make the transition easier so we can move the content discussions of guides to github?

[RogerCooper]

@thedog said in TripleA development:

I find github is not intuitive and not easy to use. I have tried to use it to upload a map and failed and wasted over 3 hours achieving absolutely nothing.

I have worked out a system for uploading mods. I will post detailed instructions soon. It is not an intuitive process..

[LaFayette]

@frigoref

Does this link work for you?
https://github.com/orgs/triplea-maps/teams/mapadmins

Do you see any way to make the transition easier so we can move the content discussions of guides to github?

This is a pretty pervasive problem. I've come to find that splitting conversations is often more harmful than trying to move them to the right place. Only suggestion I have is to spam the PR link a bit more, and be more explicit that you would prefer feedback on the branch or a PR rather than in this thread.

Overall this thread is seemingly not well focused anymore and probably the conversation should wrap up here or regain focus back to the OP.

[beelee]

@frigoref said in TripleA development:

@thedog @beelee @LaFayette
Please don't take offense in my question, but I am genuinely interested in what prevents you from using the link to make a pull request to contribution page, but you are still writing - even some extensive - posts here about what should change?

yea i made one a few days ago. I'm gonna do a test one now showing the steps for others

[beelee]

@TheDog i assume you already have triplea forked since you tried to add a map. This process is quite a bit easier. Here's what I did.

Go to frigorefs contribution page here https://github.com/frigoref/triplea/blob/docuStartGuide/docs/contribute.md

You should see a pencil icon upper right

Click on that and scroll to the tbd area you want to change. here I changed tbd to To Be Determined

then scroll down to "Propose Changes"

and give an explanation of what your changing.
Click "Create Pull Request"

Then there will be another "Create Pull Request" button (idky theres two) and you can also see the changes you made

Anyway, hit Create Pull Request again and you'll then see a PR listed in the upper left. You'll notice 2 open ones in this example. You can look at previous ones that have been closed as well by clicking on Pull requests. Works the same as issues basically which you've already been doing on the main triplea page/repo w/e it's called lol

Anyway, that's it. I'm gonna close this test one now.

I assume since this is "public" the pencil icon shows up as long as you have a fork of the triplea-game. If it doesn't show up, you'll have to ask someone more knowledgeable than me lol

Anyway, when in doubt, just keep hitting the Big Green buttons : )

[LaFayette]

Pencil icon should always be there. It'll prompt for you to create a fork eventually if you do not have one created.

[frigoref]

@lafayette the link is not working for me. I get a 404 error.

[TheDog]

@beelee
So I thought I had followed beelee's guide and added 4 lines of text to the Map Maker section, but they did not show up, what did I do wrong?

[beelee]

@thedog it's there now. It takes git a minute or two to process stuff and you need to reup/reload w/e : ) anyway, go to frigs page again and you'll see 2 PRs open

Click on yours

and then the hilighted line and it'll show your PR

Once frigoref merges (if he decides it's good to go) then it'll be in the updated/latest thingy ? : )

Also it will give you an option to delete branch once that is done. Go ahead and kill it after it's merged

[TheDog]

beelee, thanks!

A quick vent at github, why I cant I just see what my changes look like when merged into the original document.

It just needs two buttons or a toggle.

1. current version
2. my suggestions

So I can toggle between the two, its so unfriendly.
Frustration over.

[LaFayette]

@thedog there is a "view file"option to see undiffed changes (ie, the end result). google'ing frustrations can sometimes be a very quick way to remove those frustrations

[LaFayette]

@thedog FWIW: