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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