Another proposal for your critique: improving .NET 3.5
Wine-devel, Still looking at my options for summer projects and I thought this might be a good one that would work towards my goal of improving gaming for folks. As always, comments and critiques are very appreciated. I would request that, in addition to commenting on the general idea, that people also comment on the actual proposal. Does it look/sound good enough to be accepted? I fancy myself a fairly good writer but writing a proposal is still pretty new to me. :-) Thanks! John
On Thursday 01 April 2010 06:15:41 John Koelndorfer wrote:
DESCRIPTION In Wine daily (as of 3/31/2010) .NET fails to install. The Wine debugging output is riddled with stubs and fixmes. My initial work would be to examine which functions are needed by the installer and prioritize work on them. Priority would be given to blockers, obviously. Much of the work to be done seems to be in advapi and msi; I would work with more experienced developers in those areas to push patches through. I would expect this to take perhaps six weeks of time, though it is hard to say since it depends largely on what functions need to be implemented and how difficult implementation would be.
This is not something within GSOC scope in my opinion, I expect you will need 6 weeks alone to get up to speed with the concepts of msi and patching. In general I think it's better to identify a small set of APIs to implement or improve instead of aiming for a broad goal like "improving .net 3.5", which is hard to quantify and more likely to fail. -Hans
This is not something within GSOC scope in my opinion, I expect you will need 6 weeks alone to get up to speed with the concepts of msi and patching.
In general I think it's better to identify a small set of APIs to implement or improve instead of aiming for a broad goal like "improving .net 3.5", which is hard to quantify and more likely to fail.
-Hans
Thanks for the input, Hans. Looking back at previous GSOC proposals, many of them were "Improve x" (see http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode/PreviousProjects). As far as the issue of quantification, I think it's pretty easy to say "if .NET 3.5 installs, that's a success. If applications that require .NET 3.5 run (or aren't blocked by anything .NET), that's a success." Hell, even if I don't get .NET to install -- so long as I've made progress on it and it makes it that much easier for another developer, I'd call that a success. The issue of difficulty is something I've thought about. As I've mentioned, I don't have any Wine-specific experience so I am not well able to gauge how reasonable a given project is. I'm hearing very mixed opinions on some of them so I think at this point my best bet is to submit several proposals for projects I'm interested in and then do my best to see whichever is accepted through (if it is even accepted). I remember reading somewhere that as long as I work hard, not completely meeting my goals would not be an issue. Given that, I'd rather set the bar high as I think that would be better motivation. Again, thanks to everyone for their input. I will submit the proposals I have written and will probably write/submit a few more.
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 6:31 PM, John Koelndorfer <jkoelndorfer(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is not something within GSOC scope in my opinion, I expect you will need 6 weeks alone to get up to speed with the concepts of msi and patching.
In general I think it's better to identify a small set of APIs to implement or improve instead of aiming for a broad goal like "improving .net 3.5", which is hard to quantify and more likely to fail.
-Hans
Thanks for the input, Hans. Looking back at previous GSOC proposals, many of them were "Improve x" (see http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode/PreviousProjects).
As far as the issue of quantification, I think it's pretty easy to say "if .NET 3.5 installs, that's a success. If applications that require .NET 3.5 run (or aren't blocked by anything .NET), that's a success." Hell, even if I don't get .NET to install -- so long as I've made progress on it and it makes it that much easier for another developer, I'd call that a success.
The issue of difficulty is something I've thought about. As I've mentioned, I don't have any Wine-specific experience so I am not well able to gauge how reasonable a given project is.
I'm hearing very mixed opinions on some of them so I think at this point my best bet is to submit several proposals for projects I'm interested in and then do my best to see whichever is accepted through (if it is even accepted). I remember reading somewhere that as long as I work hard, not completely meeting my goals would not be an issue. Given that, I'd rather set the bar high as I think that would be better motivation.
Again, thanks to everyone for their input. I will submit the proposals I have written and will probably write/submit a few more.
If you want to do something in the .NET area perhaps some work can be done on Mono integration (see the mono topic Vincent started) and the wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono). Roderick
If you want to do something in the .NET area perhaps some work can be done on Mono integration (see the mono topic Vincent started) and the wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono).
While this has the advantage of being an area where no one has done any serious work yet (and therefore, there is likely low-hanging fruit), I don't know how you could focus this so that the scope is clear and it is easily quantified. I also don't have a sense yet of what working on Mono in Wine is like. I'm still a Mono noob, as I've done no real development there. I think that something useful could come out of such a project, but I cannot predict what.
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Vincent Povirk <madewokherd+8cd9(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If you want to do something in the .NET area perhaps some work can be done on Mono integration (see the mono topic Vincent started) and the wiki (http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono).
While this has the advantage of being an area where no one has done any serious work yet (and therefore, there is likely low-hanging fruit), I don't know how you could focus this so that the scope is clear and it is easily quantified.
I also don't have a sense yet of what working on Mono in Wine is like. I'm still a Mono noob, as I've done no real development there.
I think that something useful could come out of such a project, but I cannot predict what.
Perhaps there are some apps which mix .NET and win32 (I mean mixing in a nice way and not overriding wndproc and evil stuff). Years ago Paint.NET was ported over to Mono. I don't remember what they did but I guess they mainly removed some win32isms. The code to paint.net used to be available (I think the 3.0 source still is). You could check if it is a well behaving .NET app which uses win32. Getting Paint.NET working on mono+wine could be a good test case. Note since both of you are in MSP that might have advantages as well. Roderick
participants (4)
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Hans Leidekker -
John Koelndorfer -
Roderick Colenbrander -
Vincent Povirk