Wine-1.0 release notes
Since all of the 1.0 blocker bugs being pushed back, wine-1.0 release notes should list all of those as major known problems. Otherwise people will get a bad impression that wine-1.0 means more then less working release. Also release notes should mention that wine-1.0 is not suitable for most games (new or old) for numerous reasons, including video driver bugs, sound and video conflicts with default system setups, unavailability of required features from X server etc. And that wine-1.0 will not work at all for majority of people using other then default input methods. In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more. Vitaliy.
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
I think this deserves more discussion but I am not quite ready. I'll post a reply on Monday as an RFC to be addressed at wineconf. Thanks -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
Since all of the 1.0 blocker bugs being pushed back, wine-1.0 release notes should list all of those as major known problems. Otherwise people will get a bad impression that wine-1.0 means more then less working release.
Also release notes should mention that wine-1.0 is not suitable for most games (new or old) for numerous reasons, including video driver bugs, sound and video conflicts with default system setups, unavailability of required features from X server etc.
And that wine-1.0 will not work at all for majority of people using other then default input methods.
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
Vitaliy.
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions). Thanks, Scott Ritchie
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more. In fact, if we would have taken some old version, say 0.9.46 and backported bug fixes and known well working features - we would had a winer! Vitaliy.
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more.
0.9.58 is the best release to date! Office 2007 will run it's best in this release, and has been broke in every release after this. Their are other apps and games that have regressed as well... -Tom
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 6:04 AM, Tom Wickline <twickline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more.
0.9.58 is the best release to date! Office 2007 will run it's best in this release, and has been broke in every release after this. Their are other apps and games that have regressed as well...
-Tom
If you know of such cases why didn't you file any regressions in the past month during the regression hunt? -Zach
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Zachary Goldberg <zgs(a)seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 6:04 AM, Tom Wickline <twickline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more.
0.9.58 is the best release to date! Office 2007 will run it's best in this release, and has been broke in every release after this. Their are other apps and games that have regressed as well...
-Tom
If you know of such cases why didn't you file any regressions in the past month during the regression hunt?
-Zach
Why, so they could be differed? I would hope most of the full time hackers here test against Office 07.. so im 100% sure the regressions are known. And if for some reason their not, its a hopeless case... and me filing a report or two isn't going to help very much. -Tom
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Tom Wickline <twickline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Zachary Goldberg <zgs(a)seas.upenn.edu> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 6:04 AM, Tom Wickline <twickline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more.
0.9.58 is the best release to date! Office 2007 will run it's best in this release, and has been broke in every release after this. Their are other apps and games that have regressed as well...
-Tom
If you know of such cases why didn't you file any regressions in the past month during the regression hunt?
-Zach
Why, so they could be differed? I would hope most of the full time hackers here test against Office 07.. so im 100% sure the regressions are known. And if for some reason their not, its a hopeless case... and me filing a report or two isn't going to help very much.
-Tom
The bugs may be deferred, but if the bugs aren't reported, no one knows to fix them, albeit not likely until after 1.0. Not reporting bugs is the software equivalent of people who don't vote and expect politicians to change, get better, or do any damn bit of good. -Austin
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The bugs may be deferred, but if the bugs aren't reported, no one knows to fix them, albeit not likely until after 1.0.
Not reporting bugs is the software equivalent of people who don't vote and expect politicians to change, get better, or do any damn bit of good.
-Austin
point taken
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 9:32 AM, Austin English <austinenglish(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The bugs may be deferred, but if the bugs aren't reported, no one knows to fix them, albeit not likely until after 1.0.
If I recall correctly the criteria for target applications was that they be freely accessible such as a the Office viewers. That and my lack of free time prevented me from working on the bugs that I know to exist with office versions. I view the whole 1.0 process as flawed at this point. IMHO Wine should be able to run some versions of Office out of the box. This is just my personal view. One of the core Wintel Monopoly supporting pillars is Microsoft Office. If Wine does not run some versions even in a somewhat limited manner out of the box, then I view the whole thing as flawed. Before someone says CrossOver.....Every other free software package even with commercial backing works as expected out of the box even if it requires configuration tweaks. Current it runs none. You download Apache, it runs web pages out of the box, Samba, it can share out of the box, MySQL, databases out of the box. As it stands right now, even with dlloverride changes no version of Office that even sort of half-assed runs out of the box. Your lucky if you can get Winword 2003 to run out of the box after installing Office 2003. The only version that installs without tweaks. I'll save the rest of my rant for Monday when I have more time. -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:04 AM, Tom Wickline <twickline(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com> wrote:
Scott Ritchie wrote:
In any case, we should note why we're making a release in the first place, and make it very clear that we believe Wine 1.0 to be the best version of Wine yet in all cases (ie, no regressions).
I'd disagree on "the best" part. Looking at bugzilla and forum people thing that 0.9.58 and possibly older would qualify more.
0.9.58 is the best release to date! Office 2007 will run it's best in this release, and has been broke in every release after this. Their are other apps and games that have regressed as well...
-Tom
Where are the regression bugs for this? I don't recall having seen any filed in bugzilla...
2008/6/11 Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com>:
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
I think that this is overly harsh. It's like saying that you should not celebrate a birthday, as that is just you aging just a day, nothing more. Wine is in a strange position as it is trying to make any Windows application (ultimately) run on any suitable posix system with a suitable X server. Given that a new version of Windows is usually released every 2-3 years, with new features, APIs and functionality, the landscape is constantly changing. Couple this with each successive release of an application supporting newer technologies and APIs - the set of which differs from application to application, makes it harder to support. Yes, regressions will happen. Yes, applications will crash/fail to work. But think of all the applications that *do* work; given what Wine is working against, this is an amasing achievement. Wine can and does run Office, Photoshop, ITunes, Oblivion, Peggle and a myriad other applications (some better than others). So yes, highlight the known issues in the release notes, list the major applications (with corresponding version numbers) that are known to work and refer the user to the AppDB for more information. However, don't sell it short either. I am personally using Wine to run the Cepstral SwiftTalker text-to-speech program, play Oberon/PopCap/casual games like Peggle, Bejeweled 2 and Bloom on my Ubuntu laptop. I'm sure that other people have other success stories as well, such as Susan Cragin, who uses Dragon Naturally Speaking 9. Maybe what we need is a "What I use Wine for" set of documents or mini-articles where people describe what Windows applications they are running, what works/does not work for them. Dan's Spouse test is also a good idea. Perhaps we can get some feedback on the Spouses experiences of using the applications under Wine. NOTE: I have been testing various casual games from Oberon with the various RC releases and have found that over 50% of those tested (around 14 at the moment) worked out of the box when ran directly from their install directory. While this does not seem a lot, given what Wine is developing against, I think this is a huge success. NOTE: I am not saying Wine is perfect, I'm saying that the message should be positive and realistic instead of unduly negative. - Reece
Reece Dunn wrote:
2008/6/11 Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com>:
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
I think that this is overly harsh. It's like saying that you should not celebrate a birthday, as that is just you aging just a day, nothing more.
If birthdays would start coming every 2 weeks after about 100's you will loose track and won't care anymore which one it is.
Wine is in a strange position as it is trying to make any Windows application (ultimately) run on any suitable posix system with a suitable X server. Given that a new version of Windows is usually released every 2-3 years, with new features, APIs and functionality, I wouldn't go that far. Win2k was released in ... 2000. XP (which has some number of additions over win2k) was release in 2003 with minor additions in 2004 and 2005. And no one in their right mind makes Vista only versions. That gives us what? 8 years.
No this argument don't fly - not much is changing in the win32api world, or MS would risk killing all their legacy stuff - which is the only reason windows is still being used.
Yes, regressions will happen. Yes, applications will crash/fail to work. But think of all the applications that *do* work; given what That's the problem. After identifying a regression it should be fixed. During the code freeze, the changes should be reverted, especially if this is new functionality that's having issues. And where were are with those? We have a big list of regressions introduced by major changes to different parts of Wine either right before the code freeze or during(!) the code freeze. And most of those regressions are still not dealt with.
I'm not blaming anyone as I'm guilty creating regressions in the past. However the goal needs to shift from getting new features in, to stabilizing and bug fixing. And ~1 month for that is not enough, considering that it takes so long to fix some of the problems. I was really surprised to see _ANY_ new features getting into Wine in the last 2 months. Let alone major ones like XIM, child X windows, pixel formats.
NOTE: I am not saying Wine is perfect, I'm saying that the message should be positive and realistic instead of unduly negative.
I did not meant to make it sound that negative. After all each new version of Wine had number of important features and loads of bug fixes. Which is great on it's own. Just don't make wine-1.0 anything more then it really is - new release with bug fixes and no new features. Vitaliy
2008/6/12 Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com>:
Reece Dunn wrote:
2008/6/11 Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com>:
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
I think that this is overly harsh. It's like saying that you should not celebrate a birthday, as that is just you aging just a day, nothing more.
If birthdays would start coming every 2 weeks after about 100's you will loose track and won't care anymore which one it is.
But those releases are beta releases. The issue here is not that Wine does not have frequent releases - which it does - but that those releases are beta. The perception and reception is different. Just look at all the countless beta releases that Vista had and who was using them; the majority of users didn't start using it until release.
Wine is in a strange position as it is trying to make any Windows application (ultimately) run on any suitable posix system with a suitable X server. Given that a new version of Windows is usually released every 2-3 years, with new features, APIs and functionality,
I wouldn't go that far. Win2k was released in ... 2000. XP (which has some number of additions over win2k) was release in 2003 with minor additions in 2004 and 2005. And no one in their right mind makes Vista only versions. That gives us what? 8 years.
2007 (Vista) - 2002 (XP release) = 5 years, not 8. Vista was an exception to the release cycle that Microsoft had built since Win95. Windows 7 is scheduled for 2009, which makes that another 2 years. Excluding Vista, my statement holds.
No this argument don't fly - not much is changing in the win32api world, or MS would risk killing all their legacy stuff - which is the only reason windows is still being used.
I was told that MS has added thousands of new native APIs. There are the changes made to the theming code; the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) API; the new hyperlink control; the extension of buttons to support buttons with menus; the new file open/save API (which also has changes to the way the Win2K-style open/save dialogs are detected, I believe); the new enhanced message boxes; .... So saying that not much has changed in Win32 (and COM) is wrong. Also, look at the Wine test results to see that a fair amount of the Win32 API have changed behaviour.
Yes, regressions will happen. Yes, applications will crash/fail to work. But think of all the applications that *do* work; given what
That's the problem. After identifying a regression it should be fixed. During the code freeze, the changes should be reverted, especially if this is new functionality that's having issues. And where were are with those? We have a big list of regressions introduced by major changes to different parts of Wine either right before the code freeze or during(!) the code freeze. And most of those regressions are still not dealt with.
So, like CodeWeavers, we need to pick a set of applications that we can say "Yes, these *will* work with 1.0." Other applications *may* work with 1.0 (and you'll need to look in the AppDB for your particular application), but if they regress it will not block the release of 1.0. Otherwise, you may as well not do a release, as the mountain is impossibly steep.
I'm not blaming anyone as I'm guilty creating regressions in the past. However the goal needs to shift from getting new features in, to stabilizing and bug fixing. And ~1 month for that is not enough, considering that it takes so long to fix some of the problems. I was really surprised to see _ANY_ new features getting into Wine in the last 2 months. Let alone major ones like XIM, child X windows, pixel formats.
So what new features have gone into RC1-4 (~2 months going on a 2 week release cycle)? The major features you mentioned went in before the freeze, IIRC, so where is the problem? The regression that happened recently happened because of a fix introduced to fix a game. Yes, it broke other games (which I'd argue are good candidates for 1.0, so that particular commit should be reverted cleanly), but we need to figure out which games are important for 1.0. Another regression was the result of cleaning up deprecated alsa calls that broke older alsa drivers on various distributions (which I happened to spot - I thought it might have been the pulseaudio adapter, but my machine is currently using a real alsa driver). Regressions happen. If they are in applications that we are going to support in 1.0, they should be fixed, otherwise they should be in the release notes if relevant
NOTE: I am not saying Wine is perfect, I'm saying that the message should be positive and realistic instead of unduly negative.
I did not meant to make it sound that negative. After all each new version of Wine had number of important features and loads of bug fixes. Which is great on it's own. Just don't make wine-1.0 anything more then it really is - new release with bug fixes and no new features.
The point of the freeze is *not* to add any new features. The point is to address as many outstanding issues as possible, with minimal regression. Unless (and until) Wine has a full and complete implementation of the Windows API, then it does not stand a chance of running every application flawlessly. So the release needs to be pragmatic: which bugs are showstoppers, which applications does Wine need to run. Does anyone know what the state of installing/running Office 2003 is, because I seem to recall there being a regression in this area. That is something that I would consider a blocker. - Reece
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:20 AM, Reece Dunn <msclrhd(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Does anyone know what the state of installing/running Office 2003 is, because I seem to recall there being a regression in this area. That is something that I would consider a blocker.
It installs fine, however almost nothing works well the last time I looked. This would not bother me so much if some version of Office worked better like Office 2000 or hell even Office 97 but none of them work well enough to write home about. -- Steven Edwards "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
Since all of the 1.0 blocker bugs being pushed back, wine-1.0 release notes should list all of those as major known problems. Otherwise people will get a bad impression that wine-1.0 means more then less working release.
Also release notes should mention that wine-1.0 is not suitable for most games (new or old) for numerous reasons, including video driver bugs, sound and video conflicts with default system setups, unavailability of required features from X server etc.
Should also add that most users of ATI cards should not expect _anything 3D_ running at all because of driver bugs exposed by Wine or just plain Wine problems. Vitaliy.
participants (7)
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Austin English -
Reece Dunn -
Scott Ritchie -
Steven Edwards -
Tom Wickline -
Vitaliy Margolen -
Zachary Goldberg