Governance revisited (Wineconf report)

[Vincent Povirk]

I don't have any real reason to have a say in this (as someone who
hasn't successfully made any changes to the wine tree, for which I
blame my inability to contribute anything that belongs there rather
than any problems with the current system), but I was just thinking
that "Patch management system" and "Bugzilla" sound like similar
systems. Wine already has a bugzilla. I'd like to at least consider
how close it is to meeting the requirements.

> - Submit a patch
Can do, as long as it has a bug.
> - Specify a subsystem
Also possible, but the subsystem is specified in the bug.
> - Keep track of its progress
Yes, but there may actually not be any progress.
> - Resubmit after receiving feedback
Yep.
> - Get an overview of patches in the queue
Uhh..I guess you could do some kind of search. You'd actually see bugs
that have patches, not the patches themselves.
> - Apply a queued patch to my working copy
I don't know how this is supposed to work, even forgetting about
bugzilla for a moment.
> - Provide feedback to others
Yep.
> - Withdraw a patch
Uh huh.

Aside from the "working copy" thing, which I'm completely confused
about, you could keep track of "patch status" with keywords. Not
everyone would know how/want to maintain the keywords manually--you'd
need either an army of gnomes to patrol the bugzilla or an automated
system to attach the right keywords if you want to make things easy
for patch submitters, which it appears you do. A nice checkbox on the
attachment form saying something like "I believe this patch is ready
to be included in wine in its current form", only not as stupid, could
work (the rest has to be done by people who can handle keywords
damnit).

The other major problem is that not every patch goes with an existing
bug. Presumably, each patch IS meant to improve Wine somehow. I think
it could be made more convenient to submit a but report along with the
patch. Having the history of events related to the patch/issue in one
place (bugzilla) rather than two (bugzilla and the patch manager, or
bugzilla and the wine-patches/wine-devel mailing list archives as it
is now) could be convenient.

Or it could just add lots of unwanted clutter to bugzilla. I don't know.

> In addition to the patch submitter requirements, subsystem maintainers would
> probably like to be able to:
> - Get an overview of patches relevant to their subsystem
Bugzilla queries take care of this.
> - Recommend a patch for inclusion
Um..I guess you could use keywords for that too..

> In addition to all of the above, I guess Alexandre would need to be able to:
<snip>
> - All from within emacs
I don't want to think about this anymore.

-- 
Vincent Povirk