On 15 July 2010 17:45, Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com wrote:
I'm listening. Can you give some examples of problems I've caused? Candidates include
- the FIXME_ONCE guy; I think you and I are giving him the same advice;
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-July/085069.html so that seems fine.
As you noted in your other mail, the problem with what you're telling him is mostly that you're telling him to work on a bug like 15435 at all. You might as well have told him to work on "fixing" coding style or naming conventions.
- Misha; I told him tests were ok to submit during a code freeze; this is true,
given that Alexandre accepted tests as last as last Friday. I should have told him that tests which add stubs probably aren't ok, but he learned that as soon as he submitted. http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-June/084632.html so that seems fine.
From the look of things Misha will be ok, but I imagine he would have
been anyway.
But there are also cases like e.g. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21233#c8 where you completely miss the real issues in the patch, and instead recommend referring to a bug number in the commit log, if not directly putting in a link. Alexandre has told people several times in the past not to do that, and I believe even to you yourself. Now it turns out Mikko didn't do that, but listening to that advice would have hurt that patch more than it would have helped.
This is of course not a new thing, you've been doing that for at least as long as I've been contributing patches, but the difference is that previously you didn't give a damn about Direct3D or D3DX, focusing on real, useful applications and associated APIs instead. That means this was mostly Alexandre's problem, and whoever happened to be the relevant module maintainer, if any. Alexandre and most other Wine developers are much nicer people than me, and Alexandre enjoys rejecting patches anyway. But *I* care about Wine's Direct3D, so I'm saying something about it.
Would you really prefer I retire from Wine?
I haven't given that much thought, mostly because I don't think it's an option that has a realistic chance of happening, either way. More importantly, the "really" there is misleading, I didn't mention or ask for that. What I *would* like to ask is that you don't misrepresent yourself as somehow speaking for the Wine project, or being an experienced Wine developer. And just so it's clear, it's perfectly fine that not everyone is an active developer. Austin and Wylda for example do lots of useful work in bugzilla, without primarily being developers. But if you're giving people development advice, or are trying to influence development direction, you'd better make sure that you actually know what you're talking about. (And no, you're certainly not the only person giving questionable development advice either. I'm mostly pointing this out because you started pointing fingers.)