The point I wanted to make is, that only submitting patches or saying,
"we give wine support", may hurt the wine project more than it helps:
1.) I didn't want to write this, so not to make this thread as an
opportunity to make some self advertisement, but I need to explain:
Linux Vendors are in fact solution and support providers. We ourselves
(StartCom Linux) had the opportunity's to get a certain applications
for a certain customers going, by "fixing" a few lines. This does not
mean, that this fix was worth for the development efforts of wine. I
prefer to let others doing this job better than we do...
We do not maintain a wine source tree per se, nor do we checkout from
CVS nor do we intend to do it anytime soon. We build and rather fix our
current RPM from official releases and provide that to the customer.
However, we very carefully monitor the wine devel list and know exactly
what's going on (more or less) and are mostly up to date. Based on that
informations we publish a new RPM's for our distributions or not.
Therefor our efforts are not for the development of wine, but rather
for the usability of the end user.
2.) Linux Support and solution issues are not only based on Wine. Wine
is just one (important) application contributing to this effort. Now, a
person or company listed in such a list, might be able to hack up a few
patches, but might not be able to maintain a support level needed. Does
that mean, that a patch submitting individual gives better support than
a Linux Vendor with all the staff at hand? Having GOLD and SILVER
listings makes that issue even more difficult....(Shahar, I know you
submitted some nice work for unicode support, but does that make you
own wine or making you a better wine supporting company than others??)
3.) I think, if you want to advertise your services, setup a
appropriate website and make your offerings. Maybe instead of a list
there should be a reference to some google searches suggesting a
query....I personally think, that the community based wine should stay
that way and leave the commercial issues going their own way.
Well, I hope I made my point and wont bother anymore concerning this
issue. Hope that this input was useful and gave you some food for
thoughts....
--
Regards
Phone: +1.213.341.0390