New subject: [Bug 22642] [NOT A BUG] Wine doesn't need 1.2 release

10 May 2010

      http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22642

           Summary: [NOT A BUG] Wine doesn't need 1.2 release
           Product: Wine
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P1
         Component: -unknown
        AssignedTo: wine-bugs(a)winehq.org
        ReportedBy: t.artem(a)mailcity.com

Hello, everyone!

Recently Alexander Julliard announced plans concerning stable Wine 1.2 release.
Let me voice my opinion here and some thoughts concerning Wine development and
future.

The whole point of releasing Wine 1.0 was to attract developers and say to the
world, “We are stable” you can join us; you can even port Windows applications
to Linux using Wine-lib. AFAIK, not too many developers joined afterwards,
AFAIK few to zero Windows applications have been ported to Linux using Wine
1.0(.1) codebase. So, we shook the world by releasing the first stable open
source Win32 API and it was good for Wine's publicity and popularity. However
no such point exists at present, Wine is well known and there is no need to
announce the next stable release.

Another point of releasing Wine 1.0 was to *maintain* a stable Wine. Time has
shown no one wants to maintain stable Wine releases (do not tell me the single
update counts as an example of maintaining a project).

So, it seems to me two most important reasons of releasing a "stable" version
of Wine are completely irrelevant.

The third reason of why doing this doesn't make too much sense is that any
newer Wine release (like 1.1.44) can successfully run for more applications
than semi-stable Wine 1.0. Forcing developers to resolve 1.2 nominee bugs also
doesn't seem a good idea - some of those bugs simply need paid developers
because bugs are so complicated they need developers' sweat and blood, so
external contributors will not likely be interested and if they start fixing
them, they can be distracted from working on other no less relevant problems.
Wine's real problem is that it lacks profound regression testing. Generally,
every new Wine release is better than a previous one, but since regressions are
introduced regularly, people complain.

The bottom line is that Wine does not need the next stable release (which will
be a waste and strain of developers’ time and energy); Wine only needs a good
regression testing.

My only proposal is to change Wine releases naming scheme.

Right now we have quite meaningless 1.1.XX releases, which is dull at best. I
propose a scheme based on a year and a release number within this year.
So, the first release of year 2010 will be 10.1, the second release 10.2 and so
on and so forth. Releases' numbers are assigned on a day of release to avoid
confusion. Since this scheme has not been used before, I propose instead of
releasing Wine 1.2, start a new versioning scheme, where the next Wine release
will be 10.1. That will be a bomb, and Wine we will be a super star once again.

Thanks everyone for their hard work,

Artem S. Tashkinov

P.S. Please, repost this message to wine-devel if you find it deserving other
developers' attention.

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[Bug 22642] New: [NOT A BUG] Wine doesn't need 1.2 release

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