On 9/23/06, Robert Lunnon bobl@optushome.com.au wrote:
- Publish the patch acceptance policy - Make sure this is the acceptance
policy and not the patch acceptance process. The Patch acceptance policy should be developed by community process and be subject to change (and change control). Perhaps a standing wineconf agenda item here.
- Adapt the patch acceptance process to create a right of appeal where a
patch can be proven to be within the Patch Acceptance policy. Appeal should be independent of and binding on Alexandre - this eliminates one-to-one arguments about patch acceptability while still providing good excellent control. It will also have the effect of reducing Alexandres workload.
- Have a Wine Developers - Bill of rights - particularly preserve the right
to dissent and disagree. To develop freely, most importantly It must recognise, as Dr Gow has so eloquently said, that most Wine developers don't have any interest in WIne and must be treated as valuable volunteers. This has to be respected in the Bill of Rights.
Have a community process for properly handling process change.
Have a similar wine users Bill of rights - The users of wine need a say.
Have a community process for handling these requests according to the BOR.
Having a bureaucratic process like that would slow down the wine project more than a handful of rejected patches ever could. There may be structural problems, but bureaucracy is not the solution.
As others have proposed, I think it would be good to implement a system so that rejected patches don't just get forgotten. I don't personally think that bugzilla is a good solution to the problem though -- it's very difficult to use efficiently and the interface is terrible.
A good patch handling system might: - Watch the wine-patches list, automatically adding patches and comments (replies) - Provide a way to categorise/tag patches - Have a way of creating patch sets, which can be downloaded as a single diff (eg, WoW patch set) - Show which patches still apply cleanly - Collect statistics, and be able to show which patches or patch sets are the most downloaded - Allow logged-in users with confirmed email addresses to send comments (replies) and new patches to the wine-patches list through the website - Watch wine-cvs for corresponding accepted patches, and mark the patches that have been accepted
If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to write a little mockup in php or something.
n0dalus.