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

[Jerome Leclanche]

On 15 June 2015 at 21:59, GOUJON Alexandre <ale.goujon at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know how statuses are managed but maybe a tool can be created or
> improved ?
> We can provide a mentor when a newbie posts a patch for the first time so
> that AJ can do other things in the meantime. (or delegate to wine-staging or
> a kind of sandbox but AJ doesn't like the idea)
> We could also use the 'sign-off' feature to delegate make a patch verified
> by a trusted dev (= having a list with domain <-> trusted dev).
> We can write standard commit rules and patch lifecycle rules so that
> everyone know where their patch is far from commit.

I've been watching the Wine project for years and a sign-off of sorts
is something it really could use imho. There are several areas in Wine
which Alexandre hasn't worked on at all and isn't the best person to
judge a patch.
I've used a "GTM" ("good to merge") system in both very large
(wine-like) and very small codebases and projects. It's a type of
implicit sign-off and a system that shines best on Github where
commenting is cheap.

As a sidenote that's another issue I think: the only communication
possible is through email. Email is formal. It's archived, it's
spell-checked, it's proof-read and rewritten. So of course there's
this huge investment to tell a contributor about something small and
silly they're doing in a patch, which they might be completely
oblivious to - no answer, frustration, duplication of efforts and
sometimes patches are simply lost to that.
In the large projects I've managed or been part of, line comments in
patches are a huge deal. Being able to tell someone "you're doing
something stupid here", rather than an implicit "proof read your patch
because of its status in the queue", is a huge deal. Of course we can
do that over email but not only do we need the right tools for it (to
both do and keep track of), there is also the barrier of entry to
email itself I was talking about. 2c

J. Leclanche