December 2004 - more patches than you can shake a stick at

[Mike Hearn]

Happy new year everybody!

Being the patch fetishist that I am, I couldn't help noticing that in
December 2004 we cleared 8mb of patches: that's by far the largest since
the current archives began in October 2000.

The extra traffic came from a lot of places:

-  Huge improvements to the Application Database.

-  The number was also pushed higher by an MSI merge from CodeWeavers.

-  Some big janitorial patches went in from Michael Stefaniuc

-  Finally Rob and I were cranking out DCOM patches, and there are of
   course lots more in the pipeline.

Now time for some crystal ball gazing. Here are some interesting patches
we might be seeing in 2005:

-  Completion of the WM rewrite work. Alexandre seems to be making great
   progress on this, which will let us fix many of the odd visual
   corruption problems we've been plagued with for so long. It'll also 
   let us remerge Alexs winedesktop patch, giving us a real desktop window
   that is used for all apps, at last.

It should have many other benefits too: fixing the flickering in 
   the Half Life menus and allowing us to support the NETWM fullscreen
   protocol. This should let us resolve many instances of the "my game
   starts but I can't type" problem.

-  Lots more DCOM code. Huw Davies is hacking on getting widl to produce
   a stdole32.tlb file, once that's in we can start really nailing 
   InstallShield to the wall. We will hopefully get this and the
   thread-affinity patches in the next few months, which should mean 
   for the first time we can run InstallShield 6 installers perfectly, out
   of the box.

Support for newer InstallShields will come as time permits of course.

-  More MSI improvements! CodeWeavers are continuing to work on
   this so it should develop nicely even though the iTunes installer 
   work has been completed. Office 2003 will also motivate this. It's
   being used by at least one commercial app porting project as well.

-  Support for running Winelib apps directly, so we can get rid of the
   .exe.so extensions/shell wrapper scripts, and produce "raw" ELF
   binaries. They'll still need the wine loader app to be present of
   course, but it should all be invisible and behind the scenes. Vincent
   Beron and I have been working on this in the last week or so, and we
   just need to finish it off and convince Alexandre the extra assembly
   is worth it! :)

Who knows what the new year will bring? More apps working out of the box,
that's for sure! Have fun!

thanks -mike