Tendering my resignation

[Bandobras]

Five years ago I thought Vanilla is dead and nobody cares. Now not only it's alive and kicking, not only is its code worth incorporating into variants (and not only the other way around as it was for many years), but people actually care to the point of flame wars. Congratulations and sleep well, this new life will last long.

[konijn_]

Dear Angbanders of the world,

I've decided that it's time for me to give up the role of maintainer of Angband. <snip>
Thanks for having me! May you find Ringil soon.

Yours sincerely,
Andi Sidwell

*disappears in a puff of smoke*

I had a great reply, but a grue ate it ;\

It boiled down to you being awesome, helping out with Hellband when I just started, getting Angband GPL'ed which was quite the task, getting a team together that is willing and able to work on Vanilla and finally the V4 decision which I really like.

Cheers,
T.

[caruso]

I hardly got to know you, but five years of maintaining Angband sounds really impressive Hope to see you again sometime!

What does the maintainer of a game do actually?

[Magnate]

I hardly got to know you, but five years of maintaining Angband sounds really impressive Hope to see you again sometime!

What does the maintainer of a game do actually?

Nice question. In the old days, before takkaria came along, the maintainer did everything. He (for it was always a he, where Angband is concerned) had sole control of the source, and made whatever changes he deemed were in the best interests of the game, and released new versions when he had the time and inclination. If he was good, he would make decisions in accordance with any consensus that emerged on rec.games.roguelike.angband (the prehistoric equivalent of this forum). But however good he was, consensus was rare, and he was forced to rely on his own judgement. He was also limited in the amount of coding and bugfixing he could do alone - although a few keen individuals did send patches (albeit usually without knowing that each other had done so).

Then takkaria came along with the 3.0.7 releases, and things changed. Takkaria saw wisdom in involving more people in developing angband - people like Pete Mack and CunningGabe were major contributors to takkaria's early versions. Later on people like me, d_m, myshkin, fizzix and noz joined the devteam. People come and go, but for three or four years now there have been four or five active devs on the team, often more. This has resulted in lots more work being done to clean up the code, fix bugs and introduce horribly controversial changes (which is why v4 happened). But the other big difference is that there are now always people with whom a maintainer can discuss what should and shouldn't be changed (as well as taking the temperature here). A maintainer will no longer have to rely on their own judgement. IMO that's an even more significant change than the extra coding capacity.

Ironically, one of takkaria's parting thoughts was that the devteam no longer needed a titular maintainer as a figurehead, and could instead operate by consensus. Fortunately, there was consensus over this idea in the team ;-)

[takkaria]

Thanks everyone for all the kind words, they are much appreciated!