Jeremy White wrote:
Not that I mean to sound like a pessimist, but I'm really just calling it as I see it. No offense to anyone intended. :)
This, in a nutshell, is Wine's greatest challenge (stepping even outside ISV boundaries for a minute).
I believe, either because I'm insane (the likely explanation), or because it's true, that Wine has progressed remarkably in the past 5 years, and can no longer be correctly dismissed as unstable or unusable.
I think the shift from Alpha to Beta status was a more dramatic signal that anyone really realizes; I think it marks the point where Wine can reliably be used for a broad range of purposes.
But, bluntly, we have to prove it. We have to start by continuing the drive to a solid 1.0; we have to continue helping a small number of ISVs really succeed.
And then of course comes the fun part; we have to hold that line and not let any regressions in :-/.
<Rant>
Well that is a real sore spot with me. You know that I am a strong supporter of wine but it really concerns me that we have gone beta and not addressed preventing regessions from getting into our releases in any way. We currently have no freeze or notification of exactly when the next release is going to go out. Sure we had the one big code freeze just before 0.9 but then we went back to releasing without any notification. At his point even if our application maintainers test their app every day there is no way for them to prevent that regression going into the next release.
We had at least one known regression creep into 0.9.3. and maybe more that could have been corrected if we had some warning. I think that going to beta without any real attempt to provide even the most basic freeze release cycle is not a good thing. At the very minimum I would think that we should know when the releases are going to happen but we do not even know that.
</Rant>
But I think we can do it; it's why I'm still here.
Ditto.
--
Tony Lambregts