http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8033
--- Comment #37 from James Hawkins truiken@gmail.com 2007-10-06 18:32:18 --- (In reply to comment #36)
(In reply to comment #35)
I don't think you understand how the development process works.
I'm a *user* of Wine (via Fedora 7), not one of its developers. Wine is included in many Linux distributions as RPM files, and these RPM files are occasionally updated. From the sound of it, someone needs to have a nice (polite) chat with the Fedora packagers (and probably the others too) because you seem to be saying that the RPM update process is likely to be slowly *trashing* everyone's Wine installations. Sweet.
As a user, you are a part of the development process by submitting bug reports. Please read [1] to get a better understanding of what alpha software means.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Alpha
Wine is alpha and the developers make no guarantee of stability.
I'm not expecting stability. However, I do expect considerably more interest in bug reports. All of the reported crashes have happened with clean package installations and so qualify as bona-fide bugs.
If we weren't interested in bug reports, no one would be responding to this bug at all.
Basically: Wine now has USERS - get used to it.
All you have to do to get them back is
$ mv .wine-save .wine
Then what's the point of wineprefix? I need to be able to update my *existing* .wine installation, or the Wine developers must make it plain that anyone who wants to update his/her Wine packages is expected to uninstall all their Windows programs beforehand and then reinstall them afterwards. (And then see how many people are left using Wine...)
You don't understand the idea of a wineprefix, and that's making this conversation difficult. You can have several wineprefixes along with several different versions of Wine installed. Honestly that's besides the point though. If you upgrade Wine and an app breaks, then that is a regression and we would ask you to run a regression test to see which commit broke the app. Keeping a wineprefix between version is extremely common, but you miss the point that it's not guaranteed to work.
To sum it up, if you can't reproduce this bug with a clean .wine, then this bug will be closed as invalid.
That is a very sad attitude - the bug exists and I have posted the traces to prove it. This particular game doesn't even *start* with a "clean" .wine, presumably because important registry keys are missing, so there's a nice little "catch-22" for you! And if you're saying that Wine crashes simply because it can't find a registry key then that sounds like very sloppy coding to me.
Attitude? It's Wine policy. It sounds like you're adding registry entries from Windows to make the app work in the first place. Is that the case? If so, this bug is definitely invalid. To file a bug report, you have to be able to provide step-by-step instructions to reproduce the bug. That starts with a clean wineprefix:
$ mv .wine .wine-save $ wineprefixcreate $ wine setup.exe $ cd [dir containing exe] $ wine app.exe [crashes, bad behavior, etc]