2009/4/18 Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org:
Thank you Dan, you reminded me to forward my blog post to the list ;)
I'm not sure how to put this into your simulation as described, but there's another effect that's important: the good-enough-to-be-beta effect.
I'd say there was a significant upturn in Wine's quality around 0.9. That's where Wine crossed from being an interesting idea into something good enough to actually use - where it was good enough for actual users, so more users meant more bug reports. Yay bug reports!
I got a similar feeling around Mozilla 0.9 - where this fat, lumbering, bug-riddled, crash-prone browser that was nevertheless very important crossed some line and ... was more usable than not. I believe it was the stability push between 0.8.1 and 0.9 that did that.
Another important comment on your post links to an idea Wine needs: crash reporting. Just like Windows does.
https://winqual.microsoft.com/help/About_Windows_Error_Reporting_for_Hardwar... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001239.html
Note that the latter post advocates this for the Wine development model of fixing bugs as they're a problem: "Although I remain a fan of test driven development, the speculative nature of the time investment is one problem I've always had with it. If you fix a bug that no actual user will ever encounter, what have you actually fixed? While there are many other valid reasons to practice TDD, as a pure bug fixing mechanism it's always seemed far too much like premature optimization for my tastes. I'd much rather spend my time fixing bugs that are problems in practice rather than theory."
I wonder how much work crash reporting would be to add to Wine.
The importance of automatic reporting, of course, is that if you rely on your users to complain actively then you've already lost.
- d.
- d.