Comment 502 for bug 371897

It's alright, it will happen eventually. The wine devs have gone through the denial phase (Pulse is "not capable", it's not shipped by default on "most distributions", "ALSA compatibility is a better solution" somehow). They're just finished the anger phase (completely badgering Maarten and his work). Now they're finally in the bargaining phase ("build some reputation again and maybe we can talk") where we can start making some progress.

It's a shame that the only basis the wine devs have to reject the patch any longer is based on "reputation issues" rather than actual technical arguments. There may have been some in the past, and now there isn't anymore so they're still struggling to find reasons to reject the patch in order to preserve the reality they've built for themselves over the entire 1,794 days during which this bug has been open. It's normal -- it's simply a defence mechanism; they don't want their own reality to crumble down, so they rationalize away their reasoning, which deep down they know to be flawed, but they convince themselves that it's not.

They'll get over it eventually, it will just take some more time. Until then, we as users should just keep using patched Wine releases and patiently wait for them to come out of their comfy artificial shell.

Now, one of three things is going to happen: Either they will simply ignore this post despite knowing it to be true, either they'll cherry-pick one or two statements and provide non-technical arguments as to why they don't stand (and somehow, refuting that subset of the post invalidates the entire post), or maybe (just maybe!) they'll see things for what they really are and actually start working *with* Maarten (and, by extensions, most users of Wine) instead of *against* Maarten.

I wish Maarten the best of luck in his work and his interactions with the Wine devs. I also want to express my appreciation towards his work, without which Wine would simply not be usable at all for me.