Wine developer frustration (was Re: ntdll: Improve stub of NtQueryEaFile.)

[Jeremy White]

> Regardless of any criticism you might have on AJ's
> behaviour/communication skills, don't misquote him. That's dishonnest.

Actually, I think this quote pair is a very useful example.

Alex may not have quoted exactly what Alexandre said, but he did express 
*how it felt to him*.  It doesn't making anyone wrong or right, but it 
can explain how two well intentioned people can perceive events very 
differently.

I want to highlight a few other portions of what Alex said:

 > In desperation, I turned to IRC and was invited to participate in Wine
 > Staging. They patiently provided specific, line-by-line feedback and
 > even helped rewrite the code in a couple of places. They also accepted
 > the code into their fork to get some real-world testing.[14] By the end
 > of November 2014 (less than two months later!) the patchset was
 > accepted into mainline Wine.[12]
 >

I just want to observe how absolutely fantastic that is.  I don't know 
why our best efforts to engender that sort of thing through the years 
have never worked well, but if there is one quality of wine-staging we 
need to fiercely protect and support, it is that encouragement and 
positive engagement.

 > The idea that all discussion and development needs to happen on
 > wine-devel and wine-patches in order to gain trust is BS. AJ was
 > unwilling to take more than a glance at the UTF-7 patches until they
 > had gone through probably a hundred iterations on GitHub and the
 > wine-staging IRC channel. In my experience, AJ is far more likely to
 > accept a patch done right the first time than a patch submitted 12
 > times because the submitter keeps finding problems with it.

I did want to take a second to parse out one implication from what 
you've said.  The code, as you were able to initially form it, was a 
hundred revisions away from being ready for acceptance into Wine.

That suggests that Alexandre's response to your initial patch series 
was, essentially, correct.

The tragedy, I think, is that you were left feeling rejected, hopeless, 
and desperate.  That you did not feel like you had a path forward.

I appreciate that you would have liked Alexandre to provide the guidance 
that the wine-staging folks eventually did provide; that seems like an 
awful lot to demand of him.

I guess our challenge is to find a way to make the connection to the 
positive engagement you did eventually receive.

It would be nice if that encouragement could be happening 'here' instead 
of 'over there', but if the isolation is part of what makes it work, 
maybe that's something we should consider.

Cheers,

Jeremy