I think support has nothing to do with submitting patches.....but with giving support, if we are at it.....
Wine is going to play a major role by Linux Vendors, where support is the major income; it does it already now. Wine is integrated into migration plans quite tightly for applications with no alternative around. Now, a company giving support for wine should have enough experience and support personnel in both, Linux and Wine in order to qualify, if at all.
But than again, the question remains, who to list!? Does submitting a patch qualify for better listing? I don't think there is any connection between them...coding is coding and support issues are something else....
But I prefer to not have any such list at all, something needing support for wine will find it....
David Gümbel wrote:
On Dienstag 03 Mai 2005 10:53, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
And who to include and who not?
[..]
I can suggest a simple rule to go by, as to whether to include a company or not. In order to be included, a company has to show that it has contributed (via it's employees or directly) a non-trivial patch to wine. We can even limit it to "in the past year". At the moment, I believe only three companies pass that criteria (CodeWeavers, Lingnu, and Dimi's company, whose name he has successfully kept secret, for some reason).
I cannot say I am convinced this is a good rule to follow. First of all, maybe I got things wrong at wineconf, but I remember something like "anyone who wants to be listed there should be" being the last statement I heard in the lecture room.
While it seems to me that the selection by code contribution as proposed would not be quite feasible (what exactly is a non-trivial patch?), I also think that there is a lot more to Wine than just code, starting from documentation, including stuff like donations, helping out on wine-users, or training (commercial or not) are important, too, and won't directly bring any code into the project - which does not make these things less valuable IMHO.
So I'd suggest listing anyone who can prove he has contributed to Wine in whatever way - making a donation, having contributed code, whatever - , and let the customers decide whom to select for their particular problem.
That said, I definetly think we could allow code contributors a sentence or two of space that describes their area of expertise in Wine (i.e. what part they contributed to), as this is certainly valuable information for customers, and good advertising for those companies.
Cheers,
David