General Question Help me - I have a bit of confusion on current/future Orbiter version

Ripley

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I admit I might have some confusion regarding what is being developed, under what name, etc...but I guess my confusion is only due to my zero-knowledge of GitHub.
Excuse me in advance.
To get it straight off the way, of course the official current one is Orbiter2016.

As Martin said (answering me) in the somewhat historic announcement "Orbiter is now open source" thread, the development on the SVN platform stopped at whatever OrbiterBeta revision it was at that time (r90ish), then it moved over to GitHub:

So it looks like this GitHub version is still the "beta version" of the new OpenOrbiter that will eventually be released as OpenOrbiter_insert_release_year_here.

Meanwhile we can download the latest bleeding edge beta (with already integrated D3D9 and XRSound) from
clicking on Assets, as Martin wrote few days ago in the D3D9 thread. Did I get it clear?
(Launchpad window's title itself reads "OpenOrbiter Launchpad").

But this other page puts me a bit off, because it carries the "official" OpenOrbiter name:

Can you please help me clarify?
Thanks fellow Orbiteers.
 

n72.75

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You can see "forked from orbitersim/orbiter" in the one you linked. It's just a fork for development. I have one too.
 

kuddel

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The OpenOrbiterSim/openorbiter is just a fork of the doctors (official) orbitersim/orbiter
as can be seen in the top left:

1668029203631.png

- unbelievable: I can tell someone a thing about git / github :D
 

Abloheet

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I believe this was created by the forum administrators, by making a fork named OpenOrbiter which pulls commits from the official Orbiter repo. This fork is supposed to be the distribution fork.


And the official Orbiter repo will be the development fork
 

Face

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As with almost all open-source projects, the question of what is "official" is complicated. Everything is, or nothing is. It boils down to what users trust the most. If it is Martin's repo, that will be the "official" one. If people tend to use the O-F fork, this will be the place to go. Since there is no polished release in any of them AFAIK, it doesn't matter anyway.

Things will get interesting if any repo claims to have the next Orbiter version, and many people use that. Worst case is that the community gets divided by Orbiter versions, especially if they are incompatible. Best case is that due to the small size of the community and glacial pace of development, everybody will just be happy if anything happens anywhere at all.
 

Xyon

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As with almost all open-source projects, the question of what is "official" is complicated. Everything is, or nothing is. It boils down to what users trust the most. If it is Martin's repo, that will be the "official" one. If people tend to use the O-F fork, this will be the place to go. Since there is no polished release in any of them AFAIK, it doesn't matter anyway.

Things will get interesting if any repo claims to have the next Orbiter version, and many people use that. Worst case is that the community gets divided by Orbiter versions, especially if they are incompatible. Best case is that due to the small size of the community and glacial pace of development, everybody will just be happy if anything happens anywhere at all.

This is broadly true, though Martin is still actively contributing to his repo and we're just pulling changes into the openorbiter fork periodically, so I would always steer people to the "original" repo if they want the source code. The intention with the openorbiter repo was to produce builds because the forum staff had no way to implement them; but now we do, I just haven't looked back at it for a bit because of real life pressures.
 
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