WineConf 2015 decisions

[Alexandre Julliard]

Over the last few months there have been a lot of discussions about how
to improve our development process. I've been gathering feedback, and
last week at WineConf I summarized the suggestions in my keynote
presentation; the slides can be viewed at
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf2015?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wineconf-2015.pdf

We've then had a lot of constructive discussions about the various
points. The major decisions we've agreed on are:

- Wine-staging is now considered an integral part of the Wine
  development process, and will be used as a mechanism to enable more
  patches to meet the requirements for inclusion in the main tree. We
  will all be working together as a team.

- Bugs reported against wine-staging will be accepted in the WineHQ bug
  tracker; there will be a way to distinguish bugs specific to Staging,
  and bugs that are fixed in Staging but not yet in main Wine. The
  Staging bug tracker will be retired. Austin English is in charge of
  implementing the necessary changes in Bugzilla.

- We will switch to a time-based stable release, on a yearly
  schedule. The code freeze will start every year in the fall. Michael
  Stefaniuc will be maintaining the stable branch starting with 1.8.

- We will start enforcing a Signed-Off-By header on patches, to make it
  possible to better distribute reviewing responsibility, and to allow
  multiple authors to cooperate on a patch.

- We will keep a list of maintainer contact information for the various
  submodules; developers will be encouraged to go through the respective
  maintainer before submitting to wine-patches.

- There will be a group of people who volunteer to be assigned patches
  to review, to make sure that no patch goes unreviewed. Going through
  Staging first will also be encouraged for unfinished or risky patches.

- The patch tracker will send automated emails when a patch status
  changes; this will also serve to encourage discussion rather than
  despair when a patch is not approved.

- We will start building and distributing binary packages for all
  distros that don't have readily available packages. The packaging
  scripts and control files will be maintained in git, so that people
  can review them and submit improvements.

These changes will be implemented over the next few weeks.

I'm hoping that this will make the development process more pleasant for
everybody, and enable us to better respond to users' needs.

Once these changes are in place, I'll also encourage everybody who had
given up in disgust to give us another chance; and if things are still
not satisfactory, please send us feedback. This is a work in progress,
and we will continue to listen and work on making things better.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org