Hi folks,
You may have noticed Rob submitting a long string of OLE patches.
That is formally the last set of 'hard work' we planned to do as part of our work on our 5.0 release. Now we just have to do the 'easy part' - stabilizing for release <g>.
The big picture items included the window manager rewrite, the OLE/COM work, and the work on MSI.
I'd like to take a minute to thank all the people, both inside and outside CodeWeavers, that helped to work on these projects.
I think that these tasks represent a fairly signficant milestone for Wine - we seem to have enough working that Alexandre is willing to contemplate a non alpha release; that's a pretty big deal. (Another 11 years, and maybe 1.0 will actually happen :-/).
At any rate, this work has been a bit hard on us, because it's largely been under the hood, unsexy work that tends to cause regressions. So from a customer perspective, the rational analysis is: "you did all that work and now my windows don't scroll right? Morons!"
But one of the key benefits that the OLE/MSI work gives us, in particular, is that we can now intelligently debug issues with COM, which was always a nightmare to debug before.
And, as you all probably know, many installers rely heavily on both COM and MSI to do their work.
So we now believe that many, many more installers will 'just work' than before. And we further believe that those that don't work can be fixed in a much more straightforward way.
Thus, I am now making good on my promise to lock Rob and Aric in a room and make installers go. We've announced a formal, CrossOver based program over on our web site. However, I wanted to let you know that we'll do the same on an informal basis, particularly for known Wine developers.
I'm hoping that as a result of this work we'll soon be able to claim with a straight face: "Most things install."
So, if you have an app that doesn't install, post a message to wine-devel, and let's see if we can't make some lemonade and have a party!
Cheers,
Jeremy