Afternoon all!
Over the last few days i've been busy putting together a suite of scripts that will help our Devs and the rAthena community in general. We're becoming semi-automated!
For around a week or so there has been a cronjob running to download all the latest kRO patches and unpack them. We have a set of parsers that will go over the contents of the new files and output a few strings... which is quite exciting.
Why is it exciting?
Well, how would you like to see the latest kRO data being committed directly to the rA git repo? Automatic mapcache updates? View the new maps in a live browser-based environment? Yeah, we thought so too
This is an example of how the entry will look:
For -every- kRO patch there will be a corresponding entry in our new kRO Patch database. Once i'm satisfied that it's all working i shall place a link to it in the header of the forums.
What does this mean for our members?
It means that if the process failed to produce a valid commit, or the pull request failed then all the data will be output to the entry in the database, allowing anyone to add the code to their fork, test, then create their own pull request which will be looked at by our devs.
Why are we doing this?
The method of development and the general mindset of every *athena community is "devs y u no add dis yet? c'mon man iz in kro 4 lyk 2 years!" - and it needs to stop. The general consensus is that new stuff only gets added by devs, because they're not lazy. I'm implementing a system where we cut out the waiting time, and the support requests, and the bugs, and the attitude.
Relying on Devs to input data is a draconian method that i've been used to since my first p.serv running on applemod.. waaaaaay back when, and the mindset of users hasn't changed. We even moved to Git which allows users to add changes and upload new content, but those pull requests are still a little sparse.
More details on exactly how much data gets parsed and what we're going to do with it will be released over the course of the weekend, by which time this project will be complete.