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

[Jeremy White]

I sure picked a crummy week to go on vacation - missed our best flame
war in years! <grin>

> But the problem is that noone of us has any influence to actually do the
> changes we would like to see in WineHQ directly - and you know how quickly
> discussions on the mailing lists usually disappear again, if they get an
> answer at all. There are a lot of things where WineHQ basically doesn't pay
> attention to the user or dev community at all. I am not going to list them
> all here again, but if there is actually interest to improve the situation,
> I will gladly talk to you or other people about these issues in detail.

I wanted to rename this thread, so no one missed the real subject of the
discussion, and I wanted to respond to Sebastian's frustration.

In particular, I want to make it clear that if a discussion disappears,
it's not because no one cares.  I care deeply, and I know that Alexandre
cares deeply.  Michael cared deeply enough to hassle us into getting a
Wineconf on the calendar (and he was right to suggest spring - it would
be really nice to be discussing this in person).

The very last thing Wine needs is to lose any energy from any
contributor.  Further, I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone I know in
the Wine community that we all want this to be fun, as much as possible,
for everyone. [1]

With that said, I think this is a hard problem; I think it boils down to
a request for Alexandre to be 'nicer', with varying shades of just what
that means, and it's been discussed enough through the years that it's
hard to discuss it constructively.

But if we've missed any 'easy' improvements; any concrete, actionable
suggestions that have been overlooked or ignored, it might be helpful to
post them here into this thread.

So far, the only one of those I read in this thread is to ask bugzilla
workers to stop closing bugs that mention wine-staging with such rapid
hostility, particularly if the bug is clearly a bug in mainline Wine.
There seems to be consensus on that.  Have we now done that?  Is there
any further action we need to take?

On to the harder problem ('be nice, Alexandre' <grin>), I don't think we
tend to have good email archives of past discussions on this issue; I
think we tend to have the most productive conversations in person at
Wineconf.  Our last major conversation, afair, was when Alexandre
stunned us all by revealing the patches tracking page.

I'll try to respond to this email with my recollections, and my sense of
the problem, and see if we can think of any constructive way to improve.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[1] Alexandre once famously compared Wine to a party (this was in the
LGPL vs X11 license discussion, at Wineconf #1), in which he said the
idea is that Wine is like a party amongst friends; some people bring
beer, some people bring cups, some people bring tunes, and some people
just come to dance.  In his analogy, he went onto point out that a cover
charge would spoil the fun, but I've always liked the idea of Wine as a
party <grin>.