Dear Wine developers,
a lot of changes regarding the integration of Wine Staging have already been realized, but there are also some tasks left. In this email I would like to talk about the ways on how to submit patches that should be integrated into the staging tree. So far most patch submissions were done through our Wine Staging bug tracker, but now we would like to move the patch submission to WineHQ.
We had the choice between using a mailing list or using the upstream bug tracker. For the usual development progress a mailing list is perfectly fine, however patches submitted to Wine Staging are usually either complex, or need more work. Often multiple revisions are required, and we think that its much easier to keep track of the progress of a patchset, when all information is collected in one place. Also, it is much easier to use the existing bug tracker than writing tools for a separate staging patch overview page. ;-)
* How does it work? We want to add a new component "patches" into the Staging product in the WineHQ bug tracker. If you want so submit a patch, you can then create a new bug report and add your patch as attachment. In case of a patch series, you can either put them into a tar archive, or add several attachments. You can sign-off your patch if you want to indicate that it would be ready for integration into the development branch, and just needs some more testing. Other developers are of course invited to give feedback on those patches, too. If the patch gets accepted, the status changes to FIXED. If the patch fixes a bug and there is no open bug report for this problem yet, we might also change the status to STAGED and move it to the appropriate upstream category.
* Which patches should be sent to Staging? Normal patches should be sent to wine-patches. If Alexandre or a reviewer decides that the patch is dangerous or not good enough, they would tell you to try to get it into Staging first. Someone of the Wine Staging team will then be assigned as reviewer, and provide additional feedback / instructions how to proceed. If the patch just needs some additional testing, we will directly add it to Wine Staging. Otherwise we will ask you to create a bug report, where the patch can be improved iteratively. If you already know that your patch is very experimental, you can skip the first step and directly create a bug report as described above.
* What happens after my patch got into Staging? This depends a bit on the reason why your patch was added, but usually one or more of the following things will happen:
* you continue working on the patch and send us an updated version * someone else improves the patch (list all authors, for example by signing off the modified patch) * we remove / replace your patch if it turns out to be wrong or if we find a better solution * we (or you) send the patch to wine-patches if we think it is ready
Although there are quite a few people testing git versions of Wine Staging, it sometimes makes sense to wait till the patch was included for one release to ensure that it does not introduce any regressions.
I hope this answers all your questions regarding the patch submission to Wine Staging :-)
Regards, Michael