Full-Name: Bob Blanchett
Mailer: Elm [revision: 70.30]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.dipl-l
Date:         Tue, 24 Nov 1992 15:31:18 EDT
Reply-To:     Bob Blanchett <s1029708@GIAEC.CC.MONASH.EDU.AU>
From:         Bob Blanchett <s1029708@GIAEC.CC.MONASH.EDU.AU>
Subject:      uniform changes to judge code

Now that Ken Lowe has bowed out I would like to start some
discussion regarding what may happen as a result of his absence.

As Ken was both the admin and the creator of the judge in the
US, he was perfectly entitled to make changes to the source
and in fact, it appears that the Durban judge and my home judge
in Perth (there's lotsa openings come on down, the weather's great!)
mirrored the changes made by him and dutifully upgraded.

Now that Ken has left us, how is this consistency to be maintained?

While the judge admins are perfectly entitled to make changes as they
wish, I feel that haphazard, arbitrary changes which are not uniform
across all judge sites will lead to the situation where variants of
the same name are not in fact the same variant, due to minor changes
to a map file or to source code.

This consistency of rules across sites has allowed truly global net
diplomacy to flourish, it would be a tragedy if each judge was
to become an island simply because of these arbitrary changes.

We have all enjoyed facing off far-flung opponents and consistency
across sites is a factor that positively encouraged this.

A dip player in france should be able to sign on to any of the
judge sites and play ahaead secure in the knowledge that the
game of Machiavelli is, barring the usual options the same one
he played in Perth or in Durban.

This is especially important since the demise of Blake as the
satellite judges may have to share the load of players seeking
gamestarts for as their games on blake finish they may not be
able to find a place on the EFF judge as a limit has been placed
on the number of new games starting there.

If David Kovars is reading this, I would urge him to make any
changes to youngstown a NEW variant.

How are we to prevent this sort of problem in the future?

I would suggest perhaps a review panel made up of all the judge
admins and a few active members of the email dip community (appointed
by acclamation) to ensure any new variants introduced by admins or
any changes made to existing variants are uniform across all
judge sites. Ken Lowe de-facto fulfilled this role but now he
is out of the picture we must ensure chaos does not take it's
place.

It is my feeling that now that a new U.S. judge site has been
found, this is probably the most important problem the email dip
community faces.

This will be posted to dipl-l and rec.games.diplomacy. Please
direct and direct correspondence to "bob@werple.apana.org.au"
as this account disappers in a few days.


Happy stabs,

Bob.

--
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|Bob Blanchett          |                                                     |
|                       |                                   Surrey Hills,     |
|Ph: H +61 3 836 4160   | Mail:                             Melbourne VIC 3127|
|Ph: W +61 3 483 7400   | s1029708@giaeb.cc.monash.edu.au   Australia         |
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