Re: The endless influx of low-quality, low-realism, quantity-over-quality aircraft into FGAddon

>  "Ideas and suggestions are only valuable insofar that they result in
change"

Fair point. But it's the perceived resistance to a suggestion. Here is what
it seems like: suggestions, points of discussion, ideas seem to be taken as
criticisms, that there is a defensive attitude. Responses follow lines of
"it's" not broken, we already have that, you've not "done" anything so we
can't take it seriously, and so on.

Further, who is to say that an idea or suggestion will or will not result
in change unless it's taken seriously? But to me this thread has had little
to do with any of that.

I'm sorry, I just don't buy into the idea that effort shouldn't or can't
acknowledged unless you've "touched" the source code tree or whatever. Some
statements are so powerful that they just seem to speak to the general
philosophy and perception of the developers, "who cares", "roll up your
sleeves" (which to mean simply means "roll up MY sleeves"),

and >  "If you care about a topic, demonstrating a commitment to doing
stuff *as well* as talking about stuff, is what matters"

That's not because of some guiding thing in nature, it just seems to be the
SOP of the project.

Hell, if I said there is a GREAT holographic implementation available that
could solve many of the realism issues and I provided a link, I'm guessing
it would be ignored out of hand because I didn't write a proof of concept.
God forbid an idea from someone be worthwhile unless that someone rolled up
his sleeves and made 18 code commits first.

Like I said, I will continue to use FG because it is far superior than
others I've tried. But I will learn how to build it on my device and make
code changes and improvements for myself if needed because the air gets
rather thin at this altitude.

Personally, I feel bad for Curtis who, as I understand it, started this
project in the mid 90's. I don't know, maybe this is where he wants it to
be. Regardless, I feel bad. This idea that someone needs to make commits
before they can be taken seriously smacks of a ClubSource rather than an
OpenSource project.

Dave





On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 10:28 AM Stuart Buchanan <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I've been reading this thread with interest, but haven't had the time to
> comment before as the thread moves on faster than I've been able to respond!
>
> Some thoughts, which I've split into two as the discussion has moved on.
>
> # FGAddon / Aircraft Ratings
>
> For those not aware, the policy for FGAddon is here:
> https://www.flightgear.org/about/policy/ .  It is an svn repo for
> aircraft development, as well as the source of the default "hangar" of
> aircraft in the launcher.  So I don't think it's right to suggest that we
> should remove aircraft from fgaddon based on development status.
>
> At present we generate the hangar from all of the aircraft in fgaddon.  We
> could skip aircraft that are in very early stages of development, but I
> think we should only do that with the aircraft developer's permission.
>
> If someone has an issue with the ratings for a specific aircraft, then I
> think the first approach should be to communicate with the author to ask
> them to be adjusted.  When the aircraft ratings were originally introduced
> (after lots of discussion and consensus on this list), we did try to make
> them as clear as possible.  So if an aircraft is not meeting specific
> ratings it should be possible to make an evidence-based argument.  Clearly
> that is going to require tact and diplomacy, particularly if working across
> a language barrier.  It's not clear from this discussion whether any of the
> folks who are unhappy about specific ratings have actually done so?
>
> Personally, I've not been convinced by the arguments put forward that the
> rating system is broken.  Or that it is materially impacting new users.
> I've read a lot of opinions that it does, but beyond Richard's analysis of
> MP aircraft usage, not much evidence.  In particular I've not seen any
> evidence that FlightGear is getting less popular, which has been mentioned
> a number of times.
>
> # Contributing / Value of critique / Community
>
> James is absolutely right that what actually matters for the development
> of FlightGear is actual changes to FlightGear.  While we focus on code,
> merge requests / PR, aircraft, scenery etc, contribution does go beyond
> that, and definitely includes documentation, high quality bug reports,
> website, infrastructure.  These are all tangible contributions.
>
> Ideas and suggestions are only valuable insofar that they result in
> change. If you want to make that change happen then you either need to be
> prepared to do it yourself _or_ convince other volunteers to make
> the change.
>
> That latter path is more difficult, particularly for any code change (e.g.
> C++) because we all have very long todo lists, and you need to convince us
> to not work on something else instead.  So the bar is pretty high, and I
> personally would need compelling evidence or a truly exciting idea.
>
> There is definitely some truth that if you have contributed to FlightGear
> (by the definition above) then your views are going to carry more weight
> simply because it demonstrates that you understand the FlightGear project
> as a contributor, and that you know what you are asking others.  I'm more
> likely to use my volunteering time to work on something for you if I feel
> that you are also contributing.
>
> Finally, interpersonal skills are important, and being nice and polite
> definitely helps.
>
> Best regards,
>
> -Stuart
> _______________________________________________
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> [email protected]
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
>

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