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 am not sure that merging with another conference really makes sense, mostly because I don't really see what we are trying to accomplish by doing that. The idea seems to be "raising awareness of Wine", but to what end?
On the other hand, if the answer is just looking for a place to have developers meet without actually trying to hold a conference, that may make sense. I.e. if FOSDEM were *the* yearly event for Wine developers, then I would definitely attend, regardless of location.
--Zeb