Wine Staging patch submission

[Sebastian Lackner]

On 23.10.2015 08:23, Nikolay Sivov wrote:
> 
> I don't like that. We have bugzilla for tracking bug reports and
> mailing lists for discussions and patch submissions. This already
> works. Just use wine-patches or wine-devel (if patch is not ready for
> some reason), then you can pick from a list directly in a usual way.
> I don't see why you need separate patch page or additional tools. If
> it's not a feature specific to your repo why not submit it to wine
> directly and introduce this delay from having it staging for no
> reason for indefinite period of time? And whether it's ready for Wine
> should be a maintainer or collective decision (as it is now), with
> usual discussion on a list. If it needs more work say it on a list
> that everybody interested are already reading, multiple iterations
> are not a problem either, we have that all the time.
> 
> Basically I'd like it to always go through wine-patches. If it's
> decided it's not suitable for Wine for some reason (that is not patch
> correctness), you can decide if you want to keep it in your repo,
> leaving a note about that and not doing it silently. Having a way to
> bypass that is not an integration there was so much talk about.
> 
> 

The development branch has more infrastructure for patch management than just
the wine-patches and wine-devel mailing list, you also have to take into account
the patch status page for example. Even the development branch of Wine, where
most of the patches go upstream right on the next day, needs a way to keep track
of the patch status.

For our Staging tree we need that even more because the time between iterations
can be much longer. Using the bugtracker for that is very convenient because, as
Austin has already mentioned, all iterations and comments are located at one
place. Even if the last version of the patch is about a year old, we could still
keep the bug report open, if there is any value in those patches. We have been
using our own bugtracker for that since over a year, and were pretty happy with
this way of maintaining submissions so far.

I also think that the suggested solution does not hide anything from the rest of
the Wine developers. The WineHQ bugtracker is publicly available to everyone,
and flexible enough to configure all kind of notifications you want to receive.
I would guess most people are not really interested in Staging tree related
submissions, because even in the month after WineConf, I didn't receive any
offers from "new people" to help cleaning up our patches for example... but if
there is, it doesn't sound like something which is impossible to solve.

I have no problem with alternative suggestions, but just saying "use the mailing
lists" doesn't work. Mailing lists do not replace proper patch tracking, which
is what we are really talking about here.

Best regards,
Sebastian