[ros-dev] Wine syncing process

[Aleksey Bragin]

	Hello,
I'd like to improve the existing situation we have with Wine syncing.

Right now, we have a group of people, occasionally doing Wine syncs,  
and that group of people included me some time ago too. However, date  
was never really specified, and syncing happens "when someone wants  
to sync", "before releasing", or when something is fixed in Wine and  
we import that code.

How it should happen (in my opinion). All non-forked DLLs, tools and  
programs must be synced after each Wine minor release. This is going  
to be manual process, so we need a person to organize this process,  
and a few people who could participate in doing actual work (syncers).

What this "team" leader / responsible person should do:
* Share the work (modules) between syncers.
* Leave hard-to-sync modules to experienced developers and himself.
* Ensure all syncers are instructed to do basic testing (running our  
"golden" list of apps - FireFox, AbiWord, mIRC, and testing ole32/ 
rpcrt4/widl with a real app which uses OLE mechanism) before  
committing the work.
* Be aware about syncing dependencies (e.g. when syncing widl, it  
makes sense to sync rpcrt4 simulteneously)
* Be aware about problematic syncs (like icmp.dll sync, which  
possibly introduces memory corruption, and which is still not fixed  
in Wine).
* Keep a log of what has been synced, what has not, keep a note of  
all problems.

If that proves to work good, this team may be officially announced as  
"wine syncing team".

There are already at least two successfully working teams this way:  
Bugzilla maintaining (with Amine being the maintainer, and my point  
of contact when I want to complain or ask about something), and  
Testing team (with Olaf being often my point of contact, and  
organizing and doing all the hard work of regress testing, testing  
apps, drivers, real hardware testing and getting results submitted).  
Also, I think those two teams cooperate the best.

I wish we could expand this idea to the Wine syncing team, and get it  
to work that smoothly too, and that cooperative too.


With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.