Poschengband has been deleted from Github

[Mocht]

Poschengband has been deleted from Github

[GenericPseudonym]

It's not just the game itself. Chris's account has been deleted and is now a 404 page.

The same thing happened a few months ago to another roguelike dev, Coolthulhu (who was working on a fork of Cataclysm DDA called "Bright Nights"). Apparently some group spammed his account with reports and github's automated system took it down until they manually reviewed it.

[Derakon]

Rule 1 about this kind of thing: don't be a dick about it. Chris clearly felt strongly about how PosChengband should be played, and as he's the one that created it he's well within his rights to stop distributing it. It's not making a mockery of open source to take an open-source project, modify it, and use your modifications privately. You have no obligation to distribute your work. Chris did distribute his work for a time, for which we can be thankful, but it does not reflect poorly on him that he chose to stop doing so, for whatever reason.

[droof]

That's bad news. I like Poschengband. I wish he didn't make his repository unavailable even if he no longer supports the project.

Would it be disrespectful to put the git clone back on github to make the game versions available again?

[Gwarl]

IMO there would be nothing wrong with that. I mean, you could reconstruct it from looking back through the commit history for compos/frogcompos, and I don't think it's disrespectful to leave those up..

[Nick]

When I get around to updating the Angband Variant Repository, it'll be there, too.

[AnonymousHero]

Rule 1 about this kind of thing: don't be a dick about it. Chris clearly felt strongly about how PosChengband should be played, and as he's the one that created it he's well within his rights to stop distributing it. It's not making a mockery of open source to take an open-source project, modify it, and use your modifications privately. You have no obligation to distribute your work. Chris did distribute his work for a time, for which we can be thankful, but it does not reflect poorly on him that he chose to stop doing so, for whatever reason.

I'm sure Chris has his reasons, and I do indeed think we should be thankful for all the work he's put into PosChengband, but... (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)

... unless this decision was driven by external forces, it seems like pretty bad form generally to take the project down without any advance warning.

Glad to hear that it'll be preserved in Nick's archive as the preservation-worthy piece of roguelike history that it is.

[Destro]

Really sucks to see it wiped like that. But, oh well! That's life. Fun game while it lasted. Still going to finish my run on composband with my lvl 43 skillmaster. Hoping that some good variants continue to be developed and expand on the base game (already a few good ones).

[Pete Mack]

The trouble with PosCheng largely stems from the fast development from an ancient code base. It uses monolithic programming in spades, and is very difficult to jump in and modify. Big engineering deficit, that has already been paid in Vanilla.

[droof]

I think most variants inherit the same old code base, because they start out as tweaks on existing interesting features of another variant. Probably future variants will inherit an old code base for the same reason. Also if a variant only has one maintainer, if that maintainer stops, the variant stops.

[Gwarl]

Nah they're all inheriting different old codebases. For example, PosChengband was last vanilla in 2.8.0, whereas RePosband was last vanilla in 3.0.something

But that's not the problem with it. Didn't stop me forking after all.

[Gwarl]

Old V is full of global defines. So much stuff that's hardcoded but shouldn't be.

[Pete Mack]

The #defines are just part of it.
* The bitflags are now done properly.
* Similar attributes are kept in array, not as separate fields
* All game configuration is loaded from files, or where that is not possible, done with generated code
* UI implementation is cleaner
Large number of other smaller changes for better code quality (Knowledge menu, character sheet, birth...)

[droof]

Nah they're all inheriting different old codebases. For example, PosChengband was last vanilla in 2.8.0, whereas RePosband was last vanilla in 3.0.something

But that's not the problem with it. Didn't stop me forking after all.

Oops, PosChengband resembled Kangband and old Zangband, so I just assumed it originated from one of those, at least at some point in the long dev history

[Gwarl]

I'm not sure of the details regarding Kang, but Cheng forked from Heng which forked from a version of Zang which was originally forked from vanilla 2.8. Certainly a lot of the content originates from Kang, but I think Z is the direct ancestor.