GitLab Now The Main Development Platform For Wine

Earlier this year Wine began experimenting with GitLab to improve their development workflow for this open-source project that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux. It's now been decided that the GitLab workflow is useful and will now be their path forward.

Wine for its nearly thirty year history has largely relied on patches being sent out on their project's mailing list and Wine founder and project leader Alexandre Julliard to land the accepted patches into the mainline Wine code-base. Since earlier this year there's been an effort to modernize this by adopting GitLab for handling of merge requests to Wine.

Alexandre Julliard announced this morning that the GitLab experiment was a success. Developers liked the modern approach rather than patches via mailing lists, it was easier to track pending reviews, the ability to host more Wine projects and sharing work-in-progress patches, and better automation/CI possibilities via building off the GitLab integration. Julliard also enjoyed GitLab for it easier to manage patches, less burdensome tracking patch revisions, and more.

There is room though for improvement with sign-offs for patches being a bit more cumbersome, it's only possible to approve the entire merge request rather than individual patches, the redundancy of also posting submitted GitLab MRs to the mailing list created a lot of noise, and the GitLab threading support is rather limited.

Alexandre Julliard concluded with today's update, "I think Gitlab is working well for us, and most people seem generally happy with it. So my plan is to go forward and make Gitlab the main development platform for Wine. I'll start working on the transition, and on the improvements mentioned above."