Hi all,
[I'm addressing it to both mingw-w64-public and wine-devel]
As most of you know, Wine and mingw-w64 have a lot in common and cooperate to some extend for quite a while. There have been talks about tightening this relationship for years. Recent Wine move to using PE files for its builds led us to revisit those ideas. My feeling so far is that there is an agreement among people I heard from that it's a good direction for both projects to have mingw-w64 under an umbrella of the Wine project.
It would be great to move forward with this. Let me discuss a few aspects of the idea.
- Infrastructure
mingw-w64 currently mostly depends heavily on SourceForge. While I'm thankful to SF for years of free support, it's doesn't feel like an optimal choice those days. Wine has its own infrastructure that mingw-w64 could use right away. Moving things like mailing list, bug tracker, etc. is straightforward to do, except for one thing... how should it be called? Which brings us to the next item.
- mingw-w64 name
There have been talks about rebranding mingw-w64 for a long time (longer than I am in joined the project). While it's a good name for a branch, an established project that is no longer related to mingw.org could have a better branding. Kai mentioned that ironcrate was considered as some point, but to my knowledge no action was taken at that time. Alexandre offered lately that Wine brand could be used for mingw-w64 as well. I personally like the idea. Wine is already well recognised brand and brings roughly right associations. So... how about WineSDK?
- Source code sharing
Technically, we could share much more code than we currently do. Duplicating efforts is quite suboptimal for everyone. Right now mingw-w64 imports a number of platform headers and widl tool from Wine via wine-import.sh script. Wine has a few headers imported from mingw-w64 as well. It works to some extend, but the fact is that we still duplicate more than we share. I'm not yet sure how to fix that entirely, but I'd like us to have a workflow that would limit the duplication.
- Testing
Wine has a TestBot and a number of test cases, which is a great tool for developers to make sure their patches are right. mingw-w64 does not have such thing and mostly depends on developers doing their own testing and regression reports after the patch is committed. We could integrate mingw-w64 testing with Wine TestBot to make sure that we don't break things (well, at least limit that possibility). I believe that it would nicely accelerate mingw-w64 development workflow as well as ensure that mingw-w64+Wine don't regress.
- WineConf
The annual Wine conference is a nice chance to meet other contributors in person: https://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf It would be great mingw-w64 developers there as well.
Any ideas, comments and thoughts on this topics are welcomed.
Thanks, Jacek