[ODE] Proposal: ODE "unstable"

[Colin Bonstead]

It seems like there hasn't been much progress on ODE lately, despite the 
fact that there are lots of people using it and willing to submit 
patches.  Part of this seems to be because the maintainers don't want to 
apply any patches that aren't fully implemented, or have some bugs.  
Instead they go into the contrib folder, or don't ever get added.  The 
problem is, very few people are going to bother applying the patches 
from the contrib folder, so the bugs or missing features are never going 
to get taken care of.

What I'm proposing is having an "unstable" tree too, which has all the 
contributions in it.  People can build that tree, fix bugs, and things 
can eventually get promoted to the main tree.

I personally submitted a patch for trimesh preprocessing way back in 
June of last year.  Here's the mail:

http://q12.org/pipermail/ode/2004-June/013183.html

Nothing ever happened with it, probably since I only added support for 
it to the ccylinder collider (although any collider that doesn't have 
support should just behave as it always has).  I can confirm this 
optimization does work since we're using it in Myst V.

While I'm throwing things out here, I might as well also suggest that 
ODE switch to Subversion instead of CVS.  We've been using Subversion 
here at Cyan for almost a year with no problems, and it's WAAAY better 
than CVS.