Contributing to WINE

[Shachar Shemesh]

Hi Ronald,

I cannot stress this point enough. Wine is a community project. Everyone 
involved in the Wine project would appreciate a chance to answer your 
questions, as well as hear what you have to say.

Sometimes there is a need to establish private communication with 
certain people. As a rule, however, all technical guidance and 
discussions should be done on the mailing list. This way, everyone gets 
a chance to respond to your inquiries.

Also, it appears that many participants of this list, as well as the web 
mail archive, are having problems with the format in which you send your 
emails. Please try to send mail to this list in plain text format. The 
format in which you sent me seems to be ok, but I cannot say for sure.

Ronald Robin wrote:

>Hi Shachar, thank you for your response to my post. I am sorry for several
>things: First, that we have not tried posting to this mailing list before.
>We thought before that it would be better to establish communications first
>with the person who leads the project (i.e. Mr. Julliard). I guess that was
>my mistake. Second, that it took me a long time to respond back to you.
>You've been a great help. Thank you for the suggestions that you gave. I'm
>sure it would be most helpful in case we would need to hire some more help
>in the future.
>
>Anyway, I'd like to introduce myself again. I'm Ronald Robin of SpecOpS
>Labs. I am the Project Manager for the David Project. I'm in charge of
>managing the research and development efforts within our lab as well as
>those done by our partner universities an institutions including the the
>National Computer Center, De Lasalle University, and Ateneo de Manila
>Univesity here in the Philippines.
>
>As mandated by our President & CEO, Frederick Lewis and our CTO, Peter
>Valdez, we are glad to announce to you that one of my team's newer
>objectives is to regularly contribute to the WINE Community. To get things
>started with, I can assign some of our developers to focus working on
>something we can proudly contribute to the WINE community. We may not be
>able to dedicate a significant number of them, but it’s a start.
>  
>
Any development you can put towards the wine project would be 
appreciated and welcomed.

>I was wondering, is it ok for me to ask you some more questions? 
>  
>
Better yet, ask everyone the questions. This way, you will get answers 
even if I happen to be busy, or not know the answer.

>I believe you're one of the best persons right now to help us get some ideas
>as to what particular problem areas we can focus our contribution efforts
>on. It would be really nice if my team can contribute something significant
>to the community.
>  
>
While I thank you for the complement, this is not how things usually 
work in a free software project. As you may know, Wine has several areas 
that could use a developer's attention. We don't know much about your 
company, so it would be hard to know what areas would be best for you to 
contribute in.

First off, we would all appreciate if you sent any code you happen to 
change in Wine while working on David anyways. This basic form of 
contribution is usually the easiest for you to do. As for general areas 
of improvements in Wine, there are a few. Development there had better 
be coordinated with the people already working on these things.

Probably the area most needing tender love and care is DCOM. While 
people are currently working on it, we still depend on Microsoft's DLLs 
in that area, which is not a good thing. Another place that could use 
enhancement is MSI. Personally, I also want to see better BiDi support, 
but that's something not many of the list's members care about as much as I.

I'm sure other list members will be happy to fill in other areas where 
your help would be most appreciated.

>Thanks again.
>  
>
Any time.

>Cheers!
>
>Ronald Robin
>  
>
             Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/