[Mingw-w64-public] Wine and mingw-w64 cooperation

[Jacek Caban]

On 5/23/19 9:22 AM, Biswapriyo Nath wrote:
> Thank you for this great idea. I agree with the cooperation. But I have
> some questions and concerns.
>
> 1. What will happen to all the mails, patches, users contributions, issues,
> releases etc.?


If we move ML, it would go to new ML. Same for issues. Transaction would 
have to be smooth, meaning probably keeping both active for a while.


> 2. Where should we now send the emails and patches? I would suggest for a
> separate mailing list.


Do you mean splitting mingw-w64-public into two separated lists: one for 
patches and one for general discussion? That could probably be done, but 
I'm not sure we have enough traffic to justify that.


> 3. Will all the coding practices, restrictions (e.g. c89) of wine
> repository also apply to mingw-w64 repo?


For shared parts, I guess we'd need some adjustments from both sides. I 
wouldn't expect it to be too bad, note that it's already true for parts 
that are already shared.


As a side note, Wine uses mostly C89, but it's not exactly strict about 
that (nor enforces that by compiler flags). What's important is 
compatibility with relevant environments, standard is just a tool for 
that, not a goal on its own. mingw-w64, on the other hand, supports and 
has to continue supporting applications using -std=c89, so it has 
stricter C89 compliance requirement already.


> 4. What will happen to the other dependent FOSS projects like ReactOS,
> msys2, cygwin etc.? Are they aware of this thought?


Why would anything change for them? Suggestions mostly involve workflow, 
not the end product structure. My email was meant to inform interested 
parties and exchange thoughts and ideas. I think their developers are on 
this ML, but if you think we should send it to their MLs, please forward it.


> 5. Many Linux distributions have their own packages and patches, what about
> them?


Such patches need to be rebased on each release regardless how it's 
done, so nothing changes. (And, as usually, ideally they would be 
upstreamed, but it's not relevant to this discussion).


> Last one, in my opinion, I will not vote for the rebranding/renaming the
> repository because that may cause many confusion to normal users who are
> used to saying the name. There are hundreds of forums (also the whole Stack
> Exchange) where "mingw-w64" is a thing :)


Noted, thanks.


Jacek