On Saturday 16 September 2006 10:54, Roland Kaeser wrote:
And break other Applications.
Not urgently
Depends on the application, no? Try to get the latest and greatest programs working, you run a strong risk of breaking old programs and games. People still do play/use old games/programs, so you'd immediately alienate them. Try to fix/hack them to work, you run the risk of breaking newer programs. In the end, you'll need to do a proper implementation to get most stuff working anyway. Why waste time with hacks?
Hey guys can't anybody see the reason? The wine project (or the finish of itself) could bring linux the breakthrough.
Not with code hacked up the yin-yang. That'd be a one-way ticket to giving Linux/Wine the big "Unstable" badge.
I know a lot of people who asks as first question: Is this or the other app working on linux? Then I will think about a migration.
And with a hacked-up code base, it'd be one or the other, or neither. But most likely not both.
Yes, faster development is paid by a less of stability. But is wine currently stable?
Wine is (almost) perfectly stable. It's just incomplete. Wine itself has rarely ever crashed on me. The only problems have arisen from its /unfinished/ WinAPI implementation. When it's complete, it'll ideally make Windows apps behave just as if they were on Windows. Using hacked code to make some programs work will almost certainly make sure other programs don't (with that list ever changing as more and more hacks are introduced). Is that stable?
We should make a weekly public list of currently working applications (out of the box).
That is what AppDB is really for. But there are tons of Windows apps, and very few people that can commit keeping up with the latest changes. And it's not as simple as what works out of the box. It depends on the hardware people have, their driver versions, kernel versions, etc. Then you have to figure that the different packages for different package managers can introduce their own problems/tweaks.
I strongly think this is the measurement of the development progress of wine. This is is also the only thing users are interested in!
Just because that's what users are interested in doesn't mean that's the most important thing. A proper, manageable codebase to get 90% of the apps working later is far more important for Wine than a hacked up codebase that gets maybe 40% of the apps working now (and causing a megaton of problems to try to make the rest work later).
Do you want most apps to work in a while, or some apps to work now and most apps to work a long time from now (if ever)? And don't forget, everyone will have a different idea of which apps should work /now/. You complain about Wine taking so long to get most apps working. It'll be easilly 5 to 10 times longer to get most apps working if the codebase is mostly hacks.