Constructive podium thumping at Wineconf?

[Alex Henrie]

2016-11-07 8:47 GMT-07:00 Jeremy White <jwhite at codeweavers.com>:
> Hey all,
>
> As is tradition, on Saturday I plan to review the winehq test regime,
> and pound my fist on the table until people commit to fixing tests.
>
> We've spent the past few years managing the transition to qemu.  I've
> been using this page to triage that progress:
>
>   https://www.winehq.org/~jwhite/latest.html
>
> That reflects issues with our tests on Windows on qemu, excluding
> Windows 8 and Windows 10 (although it looks like I could perhaps add
> Windows 8 back into the mix, as the bleeding does not seem that bad any
> longer).
>
> We've stalled out at about 13 issues; we don't seem to be able to get
> below that.  (There are 8 'old' issues, and 5 new ones, in case anyone
> wants to go look, including ones from ddraw, kernel32, netapi32, and
> user32).
>
> Prior to the qemu drive, the original goal was to get at least one Linux
> machine known to run the tests cleanly.  The further hope would be that
> if we had a known set of 'good' test machines, then we could require
> that every patch succeed when run on those machines.
>
> We've made sporadic progress on that, but we did purchase a set of
> hardware with the intent of making that hardware run those tests cleanly.
>
> I see that we've driven those down to about 20 per system.  Those
> machines are 'portable', for generous definitions of portable.  But we
> could bring one or both them to Wineconf and work directly on them if we
> liked.  Would that be useful?
>
> And, more broadly, is there some other way to consider this that would
> be more useful?  Is there useful prep we can do that will give way to
> more constructive sessions at Wineconf?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jeremy

That's great news! I am curious to see how many of these Linux
failures are reproducible on common Linux setups.

The failing Windows tests are going to be complicated to fix. I could
pick one and take a crack at it, but I'm not really excited about
sending patches for complicated bugs when I send patches for simple
bugs and I get the silent treatment. If I knew that my patches would
be given fair consideration, I would try to fix some of the test
failures.

Despite the improvements that were made after last year's WineConf, I
still feel frustrated about wanting to contribute and finding myself
unable to. And I feel bad saying that because Alexandre does most
patch reviews, and he has already put so much of his life into Wine.
It's a great project--Alexandre, we all love you for it! There's got
to be a way for us to work together better.

-Alex