re: Advice about a new project, and similarity to Wine's start

[Dan Kegel]

Alessandro Pignotti wrote:
> how did Wine choose the feature set to support first?

Pragmatically - by trying to get particular popular apps running.
(Starting with solitaire :-)
> Did people use the early releases of Wine, even if they were missing features?

Yes, as soon as they ran their favorite app.

So in your case, as soon as your flash player can handle youtube.com
(or whatever free software afficianados can't live without), a
few people will start using it.
> Is the AppDB software available for use on other projects?

Should be.
> Any misc advice?

The Wine project started moving faster when we switched to
test-driven development.  I highly recommend it.  Do you
have a test suite?  And/or can you share existing test suites
( e.g. http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Testcases ) ?

That said, visual stuff is hard to test automatically, so mostly our
automated tests only test the API level.  Visual tests are
done manually and much less often (say, only when changing
directly affected code).

Automated performance benchmarks are a good idea,
though we haven't done as much of that.

Good luck!
- Dan

Advice about a new project, and similarity to Wine's start

[Edward Savage]

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 7:23 AM, Dan Kegel <dank(a)kegel.com> wrote:
> > Did people use the early releases of Wine, even if they were missing features?
>
> Yes, as soon as they ran their favorite app.
>
> So in your case, as soon as your flash player can handle youtube.com
> (or whatever free software afficianados can't live without), a
> few people will start using it.

The reality is that most people don't use a lot of flash and those who
have iPhones use even less.  Each time I try an opensource flash
player I go to youtube and if it works I just leave it as my default
until I come across a media player that breaks it and if I really want
to watch the content I switch back to adobe.  This is surprisingly
similar to my early experience using Linux over Windows!

I would say your first goal is to support youtube.  After that go out
and find as many of the popular media players made in flash and
support them based on that sites popularity.  Once you have media
players done start working on all of the silly little games and then
stop (before you start implementing flash ads support!).