RedDwarf

As I mentioned previously, I do intend to continue working on Project Darkstar part-time at least while I search for new employment opportunities. Not only will it allow me and whoever else is interested push along the original goals of the project, but it will also give me a perfect place to keep my skills sharp while I'm out of work. Selfless and selfish reasons, molded into one. However, it does not seem appropriate to continue working using what are now Oracle's resources and contributing code to Oracle's official repository. Not only are there questions about outside contributions, but there are also no guarantees about how long Oracle's official repository will remain active. So I am going with an equally reasonable and open-source-y alternative.

I have established what I hope will become an official community fork of Project Darkstar. This fork will go by the name RedDwarf and is hosted as a sourceforge project. I cannot take credit for the new name, as it was dreamt up by the original instigator of Project Darkstar at Sun Labs (Jeff Kesselman), but I do hope that it will become an even more well known name than Project Darkstar ever was in the games industry. So without further adieu, here are the new community guidelines:

• The sourceforge project is used to host what were once three separate projects on java.net. The reddwarf-server, reddwarf-shared, and reddwarf-java-client all live in the same subversion repository, but under completely separate sub-trees, each with their own trunk, branches, and tags.
• The development process should remain largely unchanged from Project Darkstar. All commits to any trunk repository must undergo a thorough review by at least one other committer, and commit privileges are earned. Review requests should be sent to the mailing list: reddwarf-develop on sourceforge.
• All design, support, and informational documents should go in the Trac instance hosted at sourceforge.
• All issues and bugs should be filed as a ticket in Trac.
• Forum discussions should continue as usual on the sourceforge hosted forums.
• Releases will be done periodically as appropriate. All releases will be published to the central Maven repository rather than the java.net Maven repositories. (This is my first task and may take some time). They will also be published as files for download on the sourceforge site.

Progress will be much slower than before, but I think it's very important to maintain the structure and code quality standards that we had established as a fully funded project. Will anything come of this effort? I'm not sure. But I think it's the best chance for coordinated progress to continue with Project Darkstar.