but you might kill yourself as well. We need to do what you said, test Wine before releasing to the public. However, this is not possible given the aggressive release schedule of the project.
Why is that so? I still do not see any benefit in calling it wine 1.0 at this time. What is the intention of this step? Attract more users? Well first, to use wine you have to use a *n*x system, which means either that you use a Mac (in which case you most probably are already using native versions of programs you could run under wine), a bsd/solaris system (in which case you already *know* wine because you definitly are not a newbie) or a linux distro (that has wine pre-installed almost with certainty..). So where is the market segment this is trying to reach? After all a version number IS a marketing argument, nothing more. Why a free & open source software project needs that - no clue. imho it is way cooler to have a fully fledged, functional and almost bug-free software with a pre-1.0-version... Attracting users by promising a major step forward - a finished x.0 release - that don't already come to wine by other means may backfire - a zillion useless bug reports, fed up newbies, many 'ruined' first-foss-contact chances ("uuuhh doesn't work on first try i'm going back to windows screw FOSS"). And I really don't think it is going to be of advantage to the code, too. ..more bug reports - what for? There's enough unfixed bugs, enough people involved hitting bugs, only too few people with the capability to fix them and i doubt calling wine 1.0 will attract more developers that are skilled enough to contribute code of a quality mr julliard is willing to commit.
So, we have to fix what we can and leave the rest until later. If you have a better plan, tell us.
Relax the code freeze a bit and stay in RC phase for as many releases as the beta phase..? regards marcel.