Scott Ritchie wrote:
On Mon, 2007-04-02 at 09:59 +1000, nicholas.g.lawrence@mainroads.qld.gov.au wrote:
Sasan ...but I think having the top most used windows software working on Wine out of the box will do wonders for its popularity
Is popularity a desirable goal?
Will increasing the number of users result in a benefit for the Wine project?
nick
Yes. Wine's development speed has roughly correlated with its user base; popularity brings more bug reports, volunteers, and funding for paid work.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
I whole heartedly agree. If it were not for "dirty little hacks" Crossover Linux would not run some of the very programs that make it so popular. Popularity with users is the driving force for developers. Developers go where the users are and I know there are enough bug reports in bugzilla to keep all the developers we can handle busy. I am not saying that we should put in just any old hack but there are cases where we really miss the boat because we want to get things "right".
Take for example bug 6413: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6413 This is just one case of a generic problem where a program provides it own version of a DLL but wine does not use it. There have been quite a number of bugs with this same problem. In most of these bug reports (all?) it has been that our implementation needed to be fixed to match what native provides. I am not sure that this is the case here but I think that is beside the point.
From past experimentation I have seen that windows will not use its own version
of a DLL if it finds one int the same directory as the program so why do we not do the same?
Yes, we would not get that particular bug report but we may have lost many more users because of the same problem. If we want to have the best of both worlds we could have a message box pop up saying that wine found a program supplied DLL and if you use it, you could be covering up a bug in our implementation of that DLL and let the user decide. Some users will try out our built in and make a bug report and that bug report will be easier to deal with that trying to track down which DLL overrides might work.
--
Tony Lambregts