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=...
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.