This of course points to another problem with the existing system - if a patch has been rejected, it should be a necessary consequence that the submitter is informed with reasons - they shouldn't have to be chasing up Alexandre to find out if the patch was rejected or merely missed (which happens often). This is not to criticise Alexandre, but to point out that systems need to be put in place to help him manage these things. Just taking patches of the mailing list is not a sufficient mechanism. What is needed is a system that records all patches, together with their current status (NEW, APPLIED, REJECTED (with reasons), and whatever other status), informs the submitter of any change, and does not allow for a patch merely to be forgotten.
We actually have a todo on Jeremy Newman's list to build a patch management system for wine-devel, for Alexandre.
Our hope was that we could adopt some of the CodeWeavers systems (we have a ticket system that's pretty slick, for example).
However, it became clear that the requirements were fairly substantial (the tight emacs integration became our first clue :-/), and that project got back burnered.
At the time we were discussing that, though, we didn't have many volunteer web programmers; maybe we should revisit that. Alexandre, would you be interested if folks other than Jer volunteered to help build such a system?
With that said, I have to ask - what open source projects are you guys working on that don't suffer from these problems? I'm now a successful contributor to the Linux Kernel (tweaked isofs for Windows CDs) and it took me 3 years and countless dropped emails, despite the personal help of Alan Cox and Andrew Morton before my patch got in (and I have another patch, a minor bug fix, that I despair will ever see the light of day). I had a similar situation with MythTV (and the #mythtv channel is actively hostile to anyone mildly clueless), and the list goes on.
Based on my experiences, I would say that Wine is a cut above, and Alexandre does a very fine job.
On the other hand, I've often thought that the developer section should have a big FAQ to help explain how Alexandre works (notably the fact that he uses the absolute minimum amount of communication required at any time) <grin>.
Cheers,
Jeremy