[Wine] How should I educate myself in order to code for WineHQ?

[James Hawkins]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 8:51 AM, jingo811 <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
>
>  Marcel W. Wysocki wrote:
>  >
>  > ....
>  > ....
>
> > but if you really need help you could always check ##c on irc.freenode.net, or just write me an email (or contact me on freenode, nick: maci), i'm not some kind of elite coder but i think i will be pretty well be able to answer your questions.
>  >
>
>  Great I'll do that in the future.
>
>
>
>  Edward Savage wrote:
>  >
>  > ...
>  > ...
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> > Jingo I'd say you really don't want to get much help with all of this.
>  > There is a very easy trap you can fall in to when learning c/cpp in
>  > that the simple tasks you are doing are easier for others to fix than
>  > for them to teach you why it is broken.  This leads to you not really
>  > learning what is wrong or how to fix it.  Believe it or not the five
>  > hours that you sit looking at some stupid simple issue will teach you
>  > more than the same amount of reading some book while you try and work
>  > through to find the solution.
>  >
>
>
>  I'll try and keep those words in mind when I get going.  Don't know if I understood what you wrote correctly though I'm getting mixed messages when reading your post, maybe it's just my bad english.
>
>
>
>  However my main objective isn't to understand how to solve things in Wine project or some major C dilemma.  I just want to know enough to be able to do some shallow diving as a Code Monkey without all that "abstract design" knowledge and responsibilities.  Be able to do what I'm ordered to do by a Code Manager.
>

If you're expecting someone to hold your hand and tell you exactly
what to code in this project, you're going to be very disappointed.
Working on Wine is different than working on most other projects.
There is a design plan, but we have no access to it.  We're blind men
feeling our way through a maze with our hands (the test suite).  Even
if a developer knew the solution to the problem, it would take much
longer for him to guide you through implementing that solution than
for him to just implement it himself.  If you really want to work on
this project, just start somewhere...do something.  No one will tell
you what to do, and reading books only goes so far.

>  To learn the ropes how things go about when an outsider contributes codes and WineHQ reviews the codes and then gives their thumbs up/down.
>  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/225200.html
>  Just knowing everything that happens in between this process is my objective.
>  You see I have sort of a disagreement with WineHQ regarding how things are run, but I can't really verbalize the issue good enough without getting my hands dirty.  That's why I want to learn C and only just enough to get my hands dirty and into the trial process correctly.
>
>  The second objective if I manage to overcome the first objective, is to map the process in "my way" and then try to attract the real coding wizards on the Internet to participate on the Wine project journey.  By my estimation this will probably take me 30 years to accomplish  :(  too slow in other words to prove my point in the WineHQ disagreement I had some weeks ago.  But I'm dead set on proving WineHQ's current methods wrong and then maybe shift the winds of power away from Microsoft.
>  Like I said there's so much info so much going on at the same time on WineHQ I can't really point my finger at the wrongs and verbalize it with correct wordings.  :? I just have a gut feeling that something isn't quite right regarding the Wine project.  Not on the coding layer but on the project management layer!
>

How can you judge anything about the Wine project, including project
management, if you are not a part of the process yourself?  Don't take
offense, but your views, by definition, are ignorant.

-- 
James Hawkins