On 5/30/06, Dmitry Timoshkov dmitry@codeweavers.com wrote:
I can't believe that writing a good test case showing the bug and adding it to the Wine test harness is such hard thing to do for a good Windows developer who already knows what he expects from a particular Win32 API.
But most developers who come to Wine are not Windows developers, they are Linux developers who want to run an app or game. Often finding the bug is much harder than fixing it these days. It takes practice to learn how to read a relay trace or debug a mysterious crash.
There is documentation showing how to do this with examples but I guess it could go further.
Once the test is in the Wine tree that becomes *much* easier to pinpoint the bug and decide what is the real fix for it.
Yes, sometimes. Some things are hard to show with unit tests. Consider the case of "I run my game and the audio glitches". It turned out that for some people that was due to scheduling problems and a fix is to use POSIX capabilities to add SetThreadPriority support to the wineserver. For somebody new to Wine that would be a very difficult problem to track down and fix, and hard to unit test.
I agree that proving a problem using a test is a good way to start for many bugs however, especially message related ones.
thanks -mike