Suggestions for improvement of the emulator

Jeremy White jwhite at codeweavers.com
Tue Sep 6 23:15:19 CDT 2005


> This of course points to another problem with the existing system - if a patch 
> has been rejected, it should be a necessary consequence that the submitter is 
> informed with reasons - they shouldn't have to be chasing up Alexandre to 
> find out if the patch was rejected or merely missed (which happens often). 
> This is not to criticise Alexandre, but to point out that systems need to be 
> put in place to help him manage these things. Just taking patches of the 
> mailing list is not a sufficient mechanism. What is needed is a system that 
> records all patches, together with their current status (NEW, APPLIED, 
> REJECTED (with reasons), and whatever other status), informs the submitter of 
> any change, and does not allow for a patch merely to be forgotten.
> 

We actually have a todo on Jeremy Newman's list to build
a patch management system for wine-devel, for Alexandre.

Our hope was that we could adopt some of the CodeWeavers
systems (we have a ticket system that's pretty slick,
for example).

However, it became clear that the requirements were
fairly substantial (the tight emacs integration became
our first clue :-/), and that project got back burnered.

At the time we were discussing that, though, we didn't
have many volunteer web programmers; maybe we should
revisit that.  Alexandre, would you be interested if
folks other than Jer volunteered to help build such a system?

With that said, I have to ask - what open source projects
are you guys working on that don't suffer from these
problems?  I'm now a successful contributor to the
Linux Kernel (tweaked isofs for Windows CDs) and it
took me 3 years and countless dropped emails, despite
the personal help of Alan Cox and Andrew Morton
before my patch got in (and I have another patch,
a minor bug fix, that I despair will ever see the
light of day).  I had a similar situation
with MythTV (and the #mythtv channel is actively
hostile to anyone mildly clueless), and the list goes on.

Based on my experiences, I would say that Wine is a cut
above, and Alexandre does a very fine job.

On the other hand, I've often thought that the developer
section should have a big FAQ to help explain how
Alexandre works (notably the fact that he uses the
absolute minimum amount of communication required at
any time) <grin>.

Cheers,

Jeremy



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