On 15 June 2015 at 18:31, Jeremy White jwhite@codeweavers.com wrote:
With that said, I think this is a hard problem; I think it boils down to a request for Alexandre to be 'nicer', with varying shades of just what that means, and it's been discussed enough through the years that it's hard to discuss it constructively.
For what it's worth, most requests seem to be either about lowering the acceptance threshold in some way (e.g. wrt. authorship, code quality, amount of tests, etc.) or providing more hand-holding. I think the majority of the request in the first category are just bad ideas. The second category are usually things that would be nice in theory, but for which people seriously underestimate the amount of work that would be involved. For things in the second category in particular it becomes an issue of weighing "How much useful work can I do in the time it's going to take me to help this person." vs. "How much useful work is this person likely to produce after I've helped him/her." Some people just need a little help to get used to the process. Some people might become competent developers once they e.g. have another 5 years of experience. Some people simply never will.
Perhaps another interesting thing to note is that the people that tend to become most frustrated are the ones that come to the project with the approach of "I need to fix this one specific application/bug right now". They tend to run into all the hard DIB-engine-level bugs, and since they need to fix it right now building up some experience and trust isn't an option, and they pretty much get stuck in that position. Arguably that doesn't have so much to do with the development model as it does with available developer capacity to fix incoming bugs.
So far, the only one of those I read in this thread is to ask bugzilla workers to stop closing bugs that mention wine-staging with such rapid hostility, particularly if the bug is clearly a bug in mainline Wine. There seems to be consensus on that. Have we now done that? Is there any further action we need to take?
I think it was more general than that, about discussing bugzilla policy in general. The plan seems to be to do that at WineConf, although personally I think it's one of those things that can happen just as well on the mailing list.
On 15 June 2015 at 22:14, Stefan Dösinger stefandoesinger@gmail.com wrote:
Also I believe many people are afraid to say "this looks OK to me" because they think it might lower their Julliard Rank if the patch contains a stupid mistake. Reviewing is harder than writing patches.
For me personally, it's more that there are various levels of review you can do. If I explicitly ack a patch to Alexandre, unless stated otherwise, that means it's something I'd personally commit. Aside from just reading/checking the patch, that implies that I've applied it, ran the tests on it, ran the tests on Windows if it touches the tests (because, the testbot and D3D), and so on. For D3D, I care enough to do that, but for most other areas I don't, and I might just point out issues if they happen to catch my eye. These days, I have enough to do that I don't even read a lot of patches though. (On that subject, if you want people to actually read and reply to your patches, try using git send-email, or at least sending them inline.)
On 15 June 2015 at 22:30, Marc Bessières marc.bessieres@mykolab.com wrote:
I agree, I think AJ and the core Wine developers are overloaded and maybe close to burn out. So they don't have the energy to build a welcoming developer community. As wineHQ is not a welcoming as it could be, the community does not grow, so they are not many new developers that can help the share the workload. So the core Wine developers are overloaded and we sadly close the circle :(
I suppose so, on some level anyway. At the same time, while I may personally feel a bit thin-spread at the moment, I'm pretty sure Alexandre is currently giving people more feedback than he ever has before. So I'm not so sure I necessarily see that correlation. I also have the impression that compared to e.g. 5-10 years ago the average skill level of potential new contributors has dropped a bit, and perhaps that generally speaking simply fewer people are interested in "proper" (i.e., not involving browsers, phones or tablets) software development.