On Sat, 12 Apr 2003, Andreas Mohr wrote:
P.S.: Alexandre, I'd REALLY like you to finally put a patch status tracking system in place. The number of people submitting patches for the second, third, bazillionth time is astonishing (I speak from my very own experience, too!). I really don't know how many very valuable Wine patches got lost due to not getting applied without any status reply whatsoever... (particularly the ones from "foreigners") Someone recently said (in WWN) that patch management was perfect or something to that extent. I better don't comment on that statement, you know my hot temper ;) OK, it's definitely not awful, but I guess it could be better.
First off, I don't think the current system is bad. Second, I was the one this in the WWN (so sue me :P). Any system that we would put in place would have to work with email just like the current one. Other suck big time, see the SF one. Once you notice that, you realize that the problem is not the system, but rather that Alexandre needs to reply to patches he rejects, wether through email/web based form/what have you.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been multiple times at the rejecting end of this, and it's frustrating. But in retrospective, it's all for a better Wine, and I'd be hard pressed to produce a patch which got rejected by Alexandre, and which I still think should be applied.
Also, your assesment that 'very many valuable Wine patches got lost' is a gross exageration. In fact, please produce 3 such patches that got lost in the last year (heck, in the last 3 years for that matter). I think you'll have a hard time finding a single such patch in the last X years (choose X as you may) that match your description.
There is good reason for this: people put work into their patches, and if they don't get apply, they ask why. This is where I don't understand Alexandre: he will eventually have to reply to such questions, why not do it proactively, it's the same amount of work, me thinks. But I'm not the one putting in the time and effort to sort through the patches, so I may be missing many things.