Governance revisited

[Troy Rollo]

On Monday 25 September 2006 23:05, Robert Lunnon wrote:
> On Saturday 23 September 2006 16:42, Mike McCormack wrote:
> > Since you know better, how about maintaining your own Wine tree and
> > showing us how it's done?
>
> Self evidently thats what I have to do until some core functionality
> patches find their way into WineHQ wine. It's not particularly hard, but it
> is time consuming to manage merge conflicts.

Actually, you're not, at least not in the sense that Mike is suggesting. On 
the other hand Mike's suggestion is a bit of a red herring since the effort 
involved in maintaining a second tree with multiple contributors *and* 
keeping that in sync with WineHQ is significant in terms of management of 
merge conflicts. When the changes on the branch are all your own you will 
presumably know (or be in a position to easily figure out) the correct 
resolution to each conflict, but with lots of contributions from lots of 
people, this job is significantly harder and more time consuming.

If there were such an alternative tree that had better patch management I 
would switch in a second, but if there were a significant number of 
contributors it could easily take a full time person to just manage merge 
conflicts. At this stage I don't know if there's enough commercial interest 
in such a tree to pay for that (although if there are people who are lurking 
who would be interested, let me know off-list).

One alternative is a set of cascading trees in which each participant 
maintains their own tree that is WineHQ plus their own changes, updated to 
some agreed WineHQ commit at the same time each week, with these trees then 
merged into a common tree. That might make it merge conflict management 
easier, but would also result in some lag between updates to Wine and updates 
to the merged tree.

-- 
Troy Rollo - wine at troy.rollo.name