Wine Stable/Release Changes

[Francois Gouget]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015, Michael Stefaniuc wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> at WineConf we had a fairly uncontroversial discussion about the Wine
> Stable release process. As the current process of feature based Wine
> releases isn't working(*) following changes were agreed upon.

I tried to make it a bit more controversial by suggesting that some Wine 
Staging patches should maybe go into the Wine Stable release. But that 
did not get very far.


The rationale is that Wine Stable is targeted at end users, not 
developers. End users don't care that a patch is ugly and should not go 
into mainline Wine for various reasons. All they care about is that 
their applications work. So it could make sense to include carefully 
selected Wine Staging patches that have been around for some time and 
have not caused regressions.

The main drawback is that it would make comparing Wine Stable with plain 
Wine a bit harder: normally we would ask Wine Stable users to test their 
broken application in plain Wine to see if it's fixed. But now the 
application may not even start due to the lack of one of these extra 
patches (rather than a simple regression).


So I don't think there's one right answer on this matter. It's more 
about where to put the cursor between user-friendliness and development 
speed / ease; and figuring out what will work best in the end for Wine.

-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
               A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure
                    until he begins to blame somebody else.
                               -- John Burroughs