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

[Josh DuBois]

On 6/20/15 11:41 AM, Jeremy White wrote:
> 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.
It seems to me that people with differences benefit from having a some 
space between them, but that doesn't mean they have to have entirely 
separate communities.  Families who don't all like the same kind of 
television can buy two TVs and watch their own shows, but continuing to 
share the rest of the house.

I think there could be a branch in winehq git called 'staging,' with 
someone other than Alexandre having commit access, and bugs in the 
'staging' branch could be considered legitimate in the winehq bug 
tracker.  There would need to be new norms for patch submission. There 
would need to be a good maintainer for the second branch. Michael said 
near the start of the thread that "access on the official winehq 
infrastructure" was a problem for some people. Maybe commit access to a 
second git branch would be a start.

One could hope that a second branch would give both "sides" enough room 
to be happy and productive, but stay together in the same community.  
Problems seem to center around tolerance of different goals, approaches, 
and skill levels.  Disagreements often happen at the point when patches 
are rejected.  With a second branch, more patches could be accepted, but 
committed *in the branch where they fit best*, and maybe there would be 
less contention.  Ideally there would be shared goals both to allow some 
experimentation in the 'staging' branch and eventually to get all 
features in a 'polished' state and into 'master.'

Keeping the diversity of goals, approaches, and even skill levels all in 
the same community seems worthwhile to me if it is possible. Making 
productive use of a second branch over the long term is not a trivial 
change.  It just seems like having people with differences stay close 
enough together to continue influencing each other is a good thing.