Included TWBT as submodule

[FalcoGer]

TWBT (https://github.com/mifki/df-twbt) is a very popular plugin. Could it be included by default as a submodule?

[thurin]

That repo is unmaintained. The issue with trying to include it as a submodule is that each release of DF requires TWBT to be patched with new memory addresses. Since the release cycles between DFHack and TWBT will be offset until the patches occur it's difficult to include it.

A patched repo is available at https://github.com/thurin/df-twbt/tree/04704

[lethosor]

I know mifki has been away for a while but said he was planning to pick up TWBT again at some point in the past couple months, so that repo may be updated again.

A couple of my thoughts here:

• TWBT has historically followed a release schedule different enough from DFHack's that moving it into the DFHack repo could be problematic. Sometimes it has more frequent releases than DFHack, but the patches it needs are mostly not used by anything else in DFHack (and are trickier to find automatically), so we've been concerned in the past about it delaying DFHack releases. I think both of these concerns are resolved now, though. There's also nothing preventing TWBT from making more frequent releases in addition to whatever DFHack bundles.
• There are some lingering stability issues for some users - granted, it works fine for a lot of people, which means that tracking these down would probably be tricky, and I'm hesitant to bundle something that we expect to crash for some users if we don't know how to address that.
• I also want to be careful not to enable it by default (although I don't think that's what you meant). TWBT used to print some output at startup, but I think it has become better at not doing that since older versions, and it definitely checks init.txt before it enables itself now, which is good.

Another possibility here is setting TWBT up as its own Buildmaster project (although that takes some effort on BenLubar's part). That would make it a lot easier to get automated builds for new DFHack releases without corresponding new DF versions (e.g. it would get rid of need to manually build TWBT for DFHack 0.47.04-r2 when it already works in 0.47.04-r1).

[warmist]

Also i'm not sure how much TWBT features will be in steam DF. That might influence if Mifki continues that project.