So I'm not sure it would be better than the discussions we already have on wine-devel.
I'm not at all convinced that we have enough discussions (being on wine-devel, or somewhere else). If I try to schematize the type of discussions we may have, I could think of three categories: A/ evolution of current architecture, setting goals, directions/directives... B/ detailed architecture (interfaces) C/ implementation details
we already have a good set of type C/ with, for example, patches review from wine-patches, and I don't think we need something extra for C/ at the moment
B/ is mostly done by, for a given item, by a single person, which doesn't give lots of opportunities to be discussed until we reach the C/ stage. Failing to know that someone is tackling an issue at this stage ends up with people stepping on the other one's toes (read wintab, openGL dynamic linking...)
C/ is also little discussed, and it's the area where I think we should focus on first. If it works, B/ and C/ would flow more easily. That's also the area where Alexandre is mostly welcome (on stage B/ we need some other people: for example, Lionel on D3D & OpenGL, Dimi for (some) comctl...).
So, when proposing IRC chatting, I was trying to find out some sparkles to fire up the type C/ kind of discussion. Again, the way to the discussion is just a way, the most important is that the discussion takes place (and there is not a single way of doing it)
From an interaction point of view: - for C/, peer review is OK IMO, and it can be done with mail, no issue here. - for B/, it will require some material (preview patches...), but in most of the cases mail (and its latency should be fine too) - however for A/ we need both in some cases low latency to agree quickly on some directions, and also long latency so that some proof of concepts can be derived.
If we should end up with a low latency echange (let's call it that way to avoid tools oriented issues), I think we also need a (non exhaustive) list of items to be looked at, to be set before the exchange.
I would put: - wine configuration - dynamic mount of FS in wine - package dependency (ie detect available packages at runtime not at compile time) - Win32 / Win16 separation
A+