On 07/25/2011 11:54 AM, louis@museresearch.com wrote:
- Does the development branch of WINE go through a battery of tests before
it is posted? What kind of criteria has to be met before a development release is made available on the main page?
Each applied patch have to compile and pass all conformance tests at least on Alexandre's PC. If even a single test fails, patch won't be applied. Alexandre usually picking most dramatic changes at the beginning of each release cycle for development version (2 weeks). Gradually lowering scale of changes towards the release date (every other Friday).
- It's my understanding that the stable branch only has select features
and patches ported over (from the wiki: "..with only minimal changes merged in"). Would this mean that if I compared a stable release with a development release from around the same time that the two releases would have significant differences? Specifically, I'm wondering about 1.2.3 vs. 1.3.15.
The Wine development version wine-1.1.44 eventually became Wine-1.2 release. The goal of the release was to stabilize Wine (no new features where accepted for a long time, only bug fixes). And to fix number of major bugs targeted for wine-1.2 (see bugzilla for details).
Wine-1.2.x are minor releases with few major show-stopper bug fixes back-ported from the development tree. Wine-1.2.1 also has number of translation additions and fixes. As well as some minor usability improvements to winecfg.
- Is 64-bit support in version 1.2.3 generally usable and stable, or is
No, it's not suitable for general use. It was one of the main targets for wine-1.2 release but had lots of issues for more complex applications.
the current development release a lot more mature in that respect?
Yes. Current development version should be able to run majority of simple 64-bit applications. And some big 64-bit applications with some issues.
Vitaliy.