Am Freitag, 16. Dezember 2005 19:48 schrieb Alexandre Julliard:
The idea is that people should test the releases. The point of the beta phase is to encourage end users to test, and for this to happen they need to be able to get binary packages, which is what the releases are about. This is why I'm making releases more frequently too, so that end users are able to test effectively without having to build from CVS.
The goal is not to prevent regressions between every minor point release, it's to make releases frequently enough that regressions can be found and fixed quickly, so that they don't creep into the next major release. Now, if you think that doesn't work I'm certainly open to doing things differently. What do you suggest?
Yet, Wine had at least one huge regression that was well known for months (the windowed OpenGL issue, bug 2398). I think it didn't even come as a surprise, it was obviously known to happen due to the WM rewrite. Still, months later, there doesn't even seem to be an experimental fix. Lots of highly specialized apps are affected, applications that used to work just fine with Wine, and I know several guys that switched back to Windows because of that regression and the fact that there was next to no visible motivation to fix that issue. I think this regression should have been a blocker for 0.9.
Right now, we have yet another known OpenGL regression (bug 4016) with no info when a fix can be expected. I reported another regression (bug 3734) that happened during the last months a while ago, that bug isn't even confirmed, yet.
Granted, sounds like whining - I'm by no means a developer, but I check Wine for regressions almost daily, report bugs and maintain a few apps on appdb.winehq.org, and it seems previously working applications get broken faster than new applications start to work. The applications I test are not office apps or other 'generic' stuff, because those aren't that important IMHO (there are alternatives for Linux), but specialized niche applications (graphics, mostly) individuals and companies need working to be able to switch to Linux (or stay on Linux, as mentioned in the first paragraph).
Ciao, Willie