Wine and mingw-w64 cooperation

[Jacek Caban]

Hi all,

[I'm addressing it to both mingw-w64-public and wine-devel]

As most of you know, Wine and mingw-w64 have a lot in common and 
cooperate to some extend for quite a while. There have been talks about 
tightening this relationship for years. Recent Wine move to using PE 
files for its builds led us to revisit those ideas. My feeling so far is 
that there is an agreement among people I heard from that it's a good 
direction for both projects to have mingw-w64 under an umbrella of the 
Wine project.


It would be great to move forward with this. Let me discuss a few 
aspects of the idea.


- Infrastructure

mingw-w64 currently mostly depends heavily on SourceForge. While I'm 
thankful to SF for years of free support, it's doesn't feel like an 
optimal choice those days. Wine has its own infrastructure that 
mingw-w64 could use right away. Moving things like mailing list, bug 
tracker, etc. is straightforward to do, except for one thing... how 
should it be called? Which brings us to the next item.


- mingw-w64 name

There have been talks about rebranding mingw-w64 for a long time (longer 
than I am in joined the project). While it's a good name for a branch, 
an established project that is no longer related to mingw.org could have 
a better branding. Kai mentioned that ironcrate was considered as some 
point, but to my knowledge no action was taken at that time. Alexandre 
offered lately that Wine brand could be used for mingw-w64 as well. I 
personally like the idea. Wine is already well recognised brand and 
brings roughly right associations. So... how about WineSDK?


- Source code sharing

Technically, we could share much more code than we currently do. 
Duplicating efforts is quite suboptimal for everyone. Right now 
mingw-w64 imports a number of platform headers and widl tool from Wine 
via wine-import.sh script. Wine has a few headers imported from 
mingw-w64 as well. It works to some extend, but the fact is that we 
still duplicate more than we share. I'm not yet sure how to fix that 
entirely, but I'd like us to have a workflow that would limit the 
duplication.


- Testing

Wine has a TestBot and a number of test cases, which is a great tool for 
developers to make sure their patches are right. mingw-w64 does not have 
such thing and mostly depends on developers doing their own testing and 
regression reports after the patch is committed. We could integrate 
mingw-w64 testing with Wine TestBot to make sure that we don't break 
things (well, at least limit that possibility). I believe that it would 
nicely accelerate mingw-w64 development workflow as well as ensure that 
mingw-w64+Wine don't regress.


- WineConf

The annual Wine conference is a nice chance to meet other contributors 
in person:
https://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf
It would be great mingw-w64 developers there as well.


Any ideas, comments and thoughts on this topics are welcomed.


Thanks,
Jacek