Governance revisited

[Robert Lunnon]

On Tuesday 26 September 2006 19:35, 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.
>
> It's very easy to say Alexandre should do this or Alexandre shouldn't do
> that when you haven't put yourself in his shoes, and tried to do what
> he's doing.
>
> Fact is, it's a difficult and time consuming job.  By reviewing your
> patches, Alexandre is doing you and everybody else in the Wine community
> a service.
>
> Secondly, patches that get no response are not "rejected".  You should
> consider them as "not obviously correct" rather than incorrect.  The
> problem may be simply that they're too complex to review and reply to in
> a short amount of time.
>
> I don't think a web based patch tracking system will work for reasons
> pointed out by Jeremy in another mail, and that it would be very
> difficult to integrate it with Alexandre's work flow without wasting
> more of his time.
>
> So I have some possible ways to enhance the current procedures:
>
> 1) When somebody has sent a patch to wine-patches that hasn't been
> applied for a few days, write to wine-devel and request that others
> review it.
>
> 2) Enter into bugzilla the *problem* that your patch addresses (not the
> patch itself), and attach the patch to the bug.
>
> These may not be to your liking, but if they're not, fork Wine and
> maintain your own public Wine tree, as Alexandre's tree is maintained
> using Alexandre's methods.
>
> Mike

Well thats at least a reasoned response, even if I don't agree with the 
reasoning.  But again you simply miss the point. I don't care that Alexandre 
doesn't move my patches (because its not true that he doesn't) and since I 
now have a patch management capability which allows me to manage my local 
tree and keep in sync with wineHQ. But wine is my/our toy now as well as 
Alexandre's and I for one want to make it better.

In that Alexandre and I should be in agreement and perhaps he should consider 
some of the positive measures I have suggested.

Bob