On Monday, August 21, 2023 3:41:43 PM CDT Joshua Ashton wrote:
On 8/21/23 19:30, Zeb Figura wrote:
On Friday, July 21, 2023 7:31:23 AM CDT Alexandre Julliard wrote:
Folks,
As you may have noticed, we haven't been making any plans for WineConf this year. Jeremy has been busy preparing his retirement, and I haven't been pushing it either, mostly because I'm not convinced that we want to continue the traditional WineConf model.
Even though we skipped a few years because of the pandemic, attendance at last year's WineConf wasn't great. We also suggested meeting at FOSDEM in February, like we did in previous years, but essentially no one showed up.
So I'm wondering whether there is still enough interest for a traditional WineConf, or whether we should try a different approach, to maybe capture some of the recent excitement around gaming and downstream uses of Wine in general.
I'd like to hear your thoughts. Should we do a Proton conference, or join some kind of gaming-related event? Do people even want to travel to conferences anymore? What kind of event would you be interested in, particularly those of you who don't show up to the traditional WineConf?
I do have my doubts about the current formula of WineConf. I think it's been well-recognized by now that the most valuable thing about it is the parts that aren't presentations, i.e. the conversations between Wine developers in the hallway and at bars and so on.
I suppose this is largely because Wine as a project is just too small for people to be unaware of what's going on. I find that most of our presentations are not news to me. That may be because I personally pay attention to what people are working on in many different parts of Wine, though, so maybe this isn't universal.
Even if this is true more generally, though, I don't know how to resolve this. WineConf without the talks seems kind of silly, and I don't know what to replace them with.
It's also true that some talks really are valuable. In the conferences I've been to I've quite appreciated the talks from the SFC (Karen Sandler in 2019, and Bradley Kuhn in 2018 and 2022), as well as the talk from Snorri Sturluson in 2018 (which, for reference, was basically about the experience of using Wine as a porting tool for a large piece of software). I found that these talks provided an interesting perspective that I am not usually exposed to. [Perhaps the same is true in reverse—that non-developers may appreciate developer presentations—but I have a hard time seeing any of these talks, especially my own, as particularly interesting; most of them end up being bland descriptions of features we have implemented.]
I think the problem here is more of one of the choice of topic and not one with the conference itself. At XDC, many of the talks were about things I didn't know about and went into great depth of specifics of eg. a piece of hardware or software I had never touched before.
I think WineConf could benefit from more talks that are discussing not "what was achieved"/news but rather how and in great depth.
I would absolutely love to see talks from either you or Gofman, or whoever doing deep dives into whatever crazy shit that I know nothing about, random crazy stuff games do, ancient stuff like dshow, all the weird red-herrings to fixing a bug.
It sounds like what you're looking for is entertainment, at least primarily. And while I think there's certainly value in that, and also that an informative talk which is not engaging lacks something important, I also can't help but feel like it's not worth holding a conference for talks which for the most part aren't going to impart some valuable and useful information.
I imagine that the scope of XDC is much broader, too, and so it is easier to find new information. Or, alternatively, the number of XDC contributors is much higher, so whereas one can get a pretty holistic picture of what's happening in the Wine world just from watching wine-devel, that's not possible with Mesa and all its related projects.
(And, to be quite frank, I get the impression that there are many XDC presenters who are much more charismatic than I am, or experienced at making engaging presentations. It's only a vague impression, since I didn't actually attend any such XDC presentations. Regardless, there's only so much effort I can put into presenting.)