2008/6/11 Vitaliy Margolen wine-devel@kievinfo.com:
In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.
I think that this is overly harsh. It's like saying that you should not celebrate a birthday, as that is just you aging just a day, nothing more.
Wine is in a strange position as it is trying to make any Windows application (ultimately) run on any suitable posix system with a suitable X server. Given that a new version of Windows is usually released every 2-3 years, with new features, APIs and functionality, the landscape is constantly changing. Couple this with each successive release of an application supporting newer technologies and APIs - the set of which differs from application to application, makes it harder to support.
Yes, regressions will happen. Yes, applications will crash/fail to work. But think of all the applications that *do* work; given what Wine is working against, this is an amasing achievement. Wine can and does run Office, Photoshop, ITunes, Oblivion, Peggle and a myriad other applications (some better than others).
So yes, highlight the known issues in the release notes, list the major applications (with corresponding version numbers) that are known to work and refer the user to the AppDB for more information. However, don't sell it short either.
I am personally using Wine to run the Cepstral SwiftTalker text-to-speech program, play Oberon/PopCap/casual games like Peggle, Bejeweled 2 and Bloom on my Ubuntu laptop. I'm sure that other people have other success stories as well, such as Susan Cragin, who uses Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.
Maybe what we need is a "What I use Wine for" set of documents or mini-articles where people describe what Windows applications they are running, what works/does not work for them. Dan's Spouse test is also a good idea. Perhaps we can get some feedback on the Spouses experiences of using the applications under Wine.
NOTE: I have been testing various casual games from Oberon with the various RC releases and have found that over 50% of those tested (around 14 at the moment) worked out of the box when ran directly from their install directory. While this does not seem a lot, given what Wine is developing against, I think this is a huge success.
NOTE: I am not saying Wine is perfect, I'm saying that the message should be positive and realistic instead of unduly negative.
- Reece