John Smith wrote:
Because it's a tedious and boring task to narrow down those unknown bugs in closed-source apps. And that's exactly why we ask you (since you got access to the sources) to tell us what the application is trying to do which doesn't work in Wine...
Ahem. And how long it usually takes to fix the bug for not-top-10 application? And please, don't suggest to fix it ourselves - it is not going to happen in corporate environment.
If you give a scenario that is easilly reproduceable, it is rare that problems go more than a couple of days unfixed. Sometimes you hit something that requires a rewirte of half the relevant subsystem, but usually it's just a small ommision, and is easilly fixed.
The thing that takes so much time is tracking the exact behavior that goes wrong.
Also I remember you've just told that fixing bugs is easy - why does it still exist then?
Fixing bugs is easy. Finding them is not. It's exactly the same with proprietary software too, btw. If a user reports "this doesn't work", my experience is that you spend two weeks in QA trying to reproduce the problem, half a day fixing it, and a couple more weeks testing the solution. It's fairly rare that the relations are much different, but do let us in on your experience.
All we are saying is "pin-point the problem for us".
Shachar