Wine Staging patch submission

[Michael Müller]

Dear Wine developers,

a lot of changes regarding the integration of Wine Staging have already
been realized, but there are also some tasks left. In this email I would
like to talk about the ways on how to submit patches that should be
integrated into the staging tree. So far most patch submissions were
done through our Wine Staging bug tracker, but now we would like to move
the patch submission to WineHQ.

We had the choice between using a mailing list or using the upstream bug
tracker. For the usual development progress a mailing list is perfectly
fine, however patches submitted to Wine Staging are usually either
complex, or need more work. Often multiple revisions are required, and
we think that its much easier to keep track of the progress of a
patchset, when all information is collected in one place. Also, it is
much easier to use the existing bug tracker than writing tools for a
separate staging patch overview page. ;-)

* How does it work?
We want to add a new component "patches" into the Staging product in the
WineHQ bug tracker. If you want so submit a patch, you can then create a
new bug report and add your patch as attachment. In case of a patch
series, you can either put them into a tar archive, or add several
attachments. You can sign-off your patch if you want to indicate that it
would be ready for integration into the development branch, and just
needs some more testing. Other developers are of course invited to give
feedback on those patches, too. If the patch gets accepted, the status
changes to FIXED. If the patch fixes a bug and there is no open bug
report for this problem yet, we might also change the status to STAGED
and move it to the appropriate upstream category.

* Which patches should be sent to Staging?
Normal patches should be sent to wine-patches. If Alexandre or a
reviewer decides that the patch is dangerous or not good enough, they
would tell you to try to get it into Staging first. Someone of the Wine
Staging team will then be assigned as reviewer, and provide additional
feedback / instructions how to proceed. If the patch just needs some
additional testing, we will directly add it to Wine Staging. Otherwise
we will ask you to create a bug report, where the patch can be improved
iteratively. If you already know that your patch is very experimental,
you can skip the first step and directly create a bug report as
described above.

* What happens after my patch got into Staging?
This depends a bit on the reason why your patch was added, but usually
one or more of the following things will happen:

    * you continue working on the patch and send us an updated version
    * someone else improves the patch
     (list all authors, for example by signing off the modified patch)
    * we remove / replace your patch if it turns out to be wrong
      or if we find a better solution
    * we (or you) send the patch to wine-patches if we think it is ready

Although there are quite a few people testing git versions of Wine
Staging, it sometimes makes sense to wait till the patch was included
for one release to ensure that it does not introduce any regressions.

I hope this answers all your questions regarding the patch submission to
Wine Staging :-)

Regards,
Michael