Hi again,
Vitaliy this are great news. I will see if I can read a bit more about XI2. :-D Keep going. You will crack that Bug. Ill try to help if i can steal Time from somewhere. But Honestly I am no Hacker. So don't expect to much of me. I am happy if I can solve the hacks vs. patch problem :P
As I see in the reaction this is a Problem that does exist in other Bugs too. (Surprise! ;) )
I think Austin is right, stopping Hacks would slow down development. And we need people hacking.
But we also need clear, and on topic Bugzilla or winewill clutter to much. (My believe) It is at least hard for me to pick the interesting Posts in Bugzilla. Or even the Interesting Bugs. Don't know but I see a lots of App based Bug reports. They get collected it one real Bug report. Which is sometimes just the first one that got reported. Hard to search for someone not tracking Bugs. (Aside Most ppl dont look enough I bet ;) )
There are some Ideas about splitting Hacks from patches. I think this maybe an aproach to solve this. Lets see:
Looking at the Mouse "escape" Bug. We have 290 Post. Haven't count but going after my feeling at least half of the post belongs more in a Forum then in a Bug tracker. It makes technical Facts realy Hard to follow. I think Bugzilla is really not suitable for Hacker Approach. Bugzilla thinks more in terms where people actually know what they doing. And in case of wine even its best developer are shouting in the dark sometimes I bet.
If you look at the Bugzilla post, you'll find: - Tech info - Approach Ideas - Discussions - Affected Infos - Instructions for installing and Bugfixing - A lot of Hacks / patches
This is hell of different information unstructured in Bugzilla.
Thinking on it, it may be better put into a maintained Wikki with different Sections to go on. There could be a menu which links people to the basic Instructions. It can hold the Hacks. It can serve as Link Collection and Info. And most Important of all it can be overhauled. Closed Discussions can be deleted. If some real approach is found all Info can be back posted into Bugzilla by some "Officer". With that a solution is accepted and likely to enter the main tree when ready. The Idea seems to be quite flexible, but maybe it won't be structured enough. Which means more work for Maintainers (I would install community maintainers :( *sight* Maybe that Idea is not good enough, what do you think? Hmm at least in vision it would give a workflow.
Any more Ideas on this?
And what should we do with the people on the Bug. Some saying the same within the bug itself. 8 Posts today. Shall I collect them and bring them here? Maybe more Brains come up with more approaches. I hesitate to do so: To much cooks corrupt the porridge. :)
Regards Peter
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Vitaliy Margolen wine-devel@kievinfo.com wrote:
Peter Kovacs wrote:
Now Vitaliy Margolen actively stopped the maintenance of this workarounds (in the bug called dirty hacks.), by marking the patches obsolete and changing title.
Yes, tried to, of course I can't stop anyone from hacking and posting their work, even on the same bug. All I can do is ask not to.
Then where do you propose people put that work?
I did this because all of those workarounds (with exception of few) done by people, who don't understand the entire scope of the problem. They've touched (and broke) parts of DInput that have nothing to do with the problem. I've already seen several invalid bug reports that were caused by some of this hacks.
This has happened with other bugs/patches too, e.g., the DIB engine/the msi hack for photoshop/etc.
Is it right to have no Dirty Hack solution which just works?
Then those hacks called proper patches. But they have to work for everything. A "Dirty Hack" is something that avoids a problem for one set of apps and totally breaks things for everything else.
Considering the main ones use a environmental variable to enable the hack, the risk of that is greatly reduced.
I'm not saying these aren't hacks. By all means, they are. But users need/want a solution, so let them have it. Perhaps I'm a bit biased though, since the last game I played (Borderlands) needed this hack, so I've also been affected ;-).
-- -Austin