On 03/20/12 23:15, HolyCause wrote:
michael,
Getting that into Wine in small and incremental patches will be hard as a big drop in patch is not an option.
I don't know if I understand "a big drop in patch"... Do you mean committing all of the changes as one, large patch?
On that note, are GSoC projects done in smaller, individual patches or are large chunks (say an entire project) integrated at once?
I apologise for my newb-ish questions with regards to wine's processes, but I guess I have to learn somehow ;)
Patches to Wine should be possibly small and incremental. Otherwise they are hard (or almost impossible) to review. That's a problem in this case. It might be very tricky to split rewrite of the parser and a good plan is required. Perhaps there would be needed some temporary hacks that would allow mixing new and old parsing code while it's rewritten part by part. I think such a project would be good, as long as student is prepared to deal with this.
Hoping to get the parser fully replaced during that isn't.
I hope I didn't imply that I wish to do this... That seems like quite a daunting task indeed. My project goals(*) line up as far as getting certain products (chromium, firefox) to build using wine; or at least, isolate the issue to non-cmd areas as others issues may arise after the cmd related issues are fixed.
(I've never worked on cmd myself, so I may be missing some details here). The point is that proper cmd parser implementation is what cmd needs the most. The more code you add before the rewrite, the harder rewrite will be. On the other side, I believe that after rewrite, fixing existing bugs should be easier and cleaner solution. So ideally, parser should be rewritten first, before doing more substantial improvements.
That obviously doesn't mean that improvements to cmd should not be accepted. Everyone is free to work on whatever he wants, and I'd really like to be able to compile Firefox under Wine, but I'm not sure we want to promote larger tasks on cmd, such as GSoC project, before parser work is done.
Cheers, Jacek