On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 01:55:19PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
At *some* point we have to stop simply releasing CVS snapshots which may or may not work/run important apps/eat your hard disk and actually do proper releases that are, you know, tested'n'stuff.
While this point will come eventually, it has not been reached: ANNOUNCE starts as follows:
This is release 20040813 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. This is still a developers only release. There are many bugs and unimplemented features. Most applications still do not work correctly.
As long as it's "a developers only release", there is *absolutely no reason" why developers should not be allowed to break things for a while. Also, please consider how often Alexandre rejects patches not because they would not be an improvement, but because they should be improved even more. *That* would also have to change once you start talking about making releases that are truly intended for users. Honestly, I don't think that this time has come already - and from my point of view, this may remain for quite a while. Those users who feel differently currently have the option the use wine versions that have been developed/modified for user- use: Codewavers and Transgamings wine flavours.
Once Wine is declared to be ready for "ordinary users", the development process should indeed change. A good example on how to continue is KDE: Currently, development is done in two different branches: HEAD and 3_3_BRANCH: In HEAD developers are free to develop things, add new things (and occasionally break things: HEAD doesn't even compile from time to time). 3_3_BRANCH must be stable, changes to it a reviewed etc. IMO, this would also be a good way for wine, once it's considered to be sufficiently stable and feature "complete".
Ciao Joerg