People,
I think everybody here agrees that Wine's biggest problem is the lack of developers. No developers, slow progress, no users, back to no developers. We are in this vicious circle for a while, spinning our wheels like crazy. We've achieved great progress lately, but I hope we all agree that Wine is a vast project that can succeed only with a mass appeal similar to the fueling the development of the Linux Kernel.
Why are we in this position? For reasons I will not go into right now, it seems painfully obvious to me that we are suffering from a severe case of Bad Public Image (tm). Whenever I talk to people not intimately familiar with Wine, about our beloved project, I am _always_ treated with the same reaction: a surprised "Really, it works? Hmmm, I thought it was only running Freecell...". Translation: people consider Wine a huge hack that can run (by some strange happenings) some apps, sometimes. It is viewed as unreliable, "freak of nature sideshow"; something (maybe) cool to talk about, but utterly useless.
THIS IS OUR PROBLEM. The lack of users follows trivially. We know the above opinion is not true. *I* get constantly amazed by how much progress we've made. Something must be done, and I think there is something to be done.
How do we change this state of affairs? Well, people need major events to reevaluate their opinions. Being major, they are by definition few, and so we don't have too many chances. For Wine, these events are the upcoming x.y releases. What I'm trying to say is that we have to prepare properly for them.
Here's my concrete proposal for releases: 0.8.x : Wine is usable, we don't guarantee binary compatibility 0.9.x : Wine is usable, and we kinda guarantee binary compatibility 1.0.x : Wine is quite usable, we guarantee binary compatibility
I'll define these things more precisely later, but before that, let me explain why we should introduce the 0.8.x series: -- a chance to attract more users into the fold -- Wine is approaching that stage fast -- it's a logical, interim step to 0.9 -- will help us focus Whatever the reason, it's a _logical_ step that we must go through in our journey to 0.9, and from a user's perspective, it makes sense to make it public. There's no point in robbing us of the userbase for a abstract techy goal of binary compatibility. That's the next stage.
Criteria for these releases:
0.8.0 -- Wine runs several popular apps well (we're close) -- Web site is updated (e.g. Who's Who, etc) -- Existing docs are up-to-date -- Utilities are close to final form (winebuild, etc.)
0.9.0 -- DLL separation complete -- Server protocol complete
1.0.0 -- Major bugs squashed -- Flawless UI -- Complete docs
I'll leave it at that. Comments, flames?