Hello Everyone,
Due to prior commitments I was not available to attend this years conference. I have a few questions and suggestions maybe you guys can help me and others better understand the forthcoming changes.
I as well as others are not totally aware of the changes, see. : http://wine-staging.com/news/2015-09-25-winehq-integration.html
Would it be possible to have a wine-staging dev mailing list setup?
A wine-staging patches mailing list setup?
A wine-staging announce list setup?
A new section in the forums for wine-staging added?
Will the wine-staging releases be listed in the latest releases on winehg.org?
Will wine-staging releases be run in the news section of winehq.org?
Who will be the primary maintainer of wine-staging? Or list of maintainers if multiple people have commit privileges...
Was a overhaul of winehq.org discussed? The site really needs to be mobile friendly if you want the site to remain relevant in the future. :)
Wine-staging currently has Mac OSX binary builds, does winehq plan to have Mac OSX binary builds in the future?
Cheers,
Tom
Over the last few months there have been a lot of discussions about how
to improve our development process. I've been gathering feedback, and
last week at WineConf I summarized the suggestions in my keynote
presentation; the slides can be viewed at
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf2015?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wineconf-2015.pdf
We've then had a lot of constructive discussions about the various
points. The major decisions we've agreed on are:
- Wine-staging is now considered an integral part of the Wine
development process, and will be used as a mechanism to enable more
patches to meet the requirements for inclusion in the main tree. We
will all be working together as a team.
- Bugs reported against wine-staging will be accepted in the WineHQ bug
tracker; there will be a way to distinguish bugs specific to Staging,
and bugs that are fixed in Staging but not yet in main Wine. The
Staging bug tracker will be retired. Austin English is in charge of
implementing the necessary changes in Bugzilla.
- We will switch to a time-based stable release, on a yearly
schedule. The code freeze will start every year in the fall. Michael
Stefaniuc will be maintaining the stable branch starting with 1.8.
- We will start enforcing a Signed-Off-By header on patches, to make it
possible to better distribute reviewing responsibility, and to allow
multiple authors to cooperate on a patch.
- We will keep a list of maintainer contact information for the various
submodules; developers will be encouraged to go through the respective
maintainer before submitting to wine-patches.
- There will be a group of people who volunteer to be assigned patches
to review, to make sure that no patch goes unreviewed. Going through
Staging first will also be encouraged for unfinished or risky patches.
- The patch tracker will send automated emails when a patch status
changes; this will also serve to encourage discussion rather than
despair when a patch is not approved.
- We will start building and distributing binary packages for all
distros that don't have readily available packages. The packaging
scripts and control files will be maintained in git, so that people
can review them and submit improvements.
These changes will be implemented over the next few weeks.
I'm hoping that this will make the development process more pleasant for
everybody, and enable us to better respond to users' needs.
Once these changes are in place, I'll also encourage everybody who had
given up in disgust to give us another chance; and if things are still
not satisfactory, please send us feedback. This is a work in progress,
and we will continue to listen and work on making things better.
--
Alexandre Julliard
julliard@winehq.org