Suggestions for improvement of the emulator

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Troy Rollo" <wine at troy.rollo.name> wrote:

> Even as things are now there is a disincentive to new developers. Some 
> developers don't bother submitting patches because they feel it's too much 
> work to get them accepted,

Right, if the patch is a pure hack, or of a bad quality, it won't be accepted.
If you insists, that that should not be an obstacle for accepting patches, or
even that the patches can be committed without review and approval, then you
don't understand something.

> and sometimes the patch doesn't get written at all 
> because there is not enough certainty that it will be accepted. Before you 
> suggest that this is speculative, I have one developer here who has made 
> patches to fix Wine bugs experienced at home and not submitted them for that 
> exact reason.

That's not Alexandre's problem at all. You blame him, that he doesn't accept
patches of poor quality, or doing wrong things, or not properly tested.

> You can try getting guidance on what is likely to be accepted, 
> but again you run into a bandwidth problem with Alexandre - one person cannot 
> effectively give guidance to everybody who needs it, and such guidance as he 
> is able to give doesn't always help that much.

That's why we have wine-devel. If in doubt, or need a guidance - ask there,
not blame Alexandre that you don't know how to fix a bug, or implement an API,
that's simply not professional.

> The process requires that 
> developers risk their work amounting to nothing because it won't be accepted.

This is true for any other project as well.

> How many times have you seen people say that "Alexandre doesn't always know 
> what he wants, but he knows what he doesn't want"?.

Not true. Alexandre almost always tells everyone that Wine needs to behave
like Windows does, and if in doubt - implement it the same way as in Windows.
The only problem which arises with that aproach is that we often don't know
how some functionality is done in low level in Windows. Alexandre sometimes
doesn't know either, but that's not the reason to blame him for that.

> That perception is partly 
> due to the fact that it is impossible for one person to take the time to 
> really understand what is wanted for every area of Wine that is being worked 
> on at any one time (humans are linear, it limits them).

That's a pure speculation, I won't say more.

-- 
Dmitry.