Hello All, I mentioned the other day in the noise about the upcoming 1.0 and the short comings I felt it had. Others have commented quite a bit on the subject already and so I'll be pretty brief. I think the 1.0 process while its been slow has been a good even with its shortcomings. Like with everything its a learning process and hopefully we will be able to tweak the process further for 1.x releases.
On the positive side, I think that Dan has done a great job as release manager, maintaining the bug lists, working on winetest, staying on top of all the tips and tricks needed to make Valgrind really useful and maintaining winetricks. I'm also really glad that Alexandre did a lot of refinement to the winetest infrastructure, everything he has done with the Wine infrastructure leading up to this point and frankly for everything he's done for Wine for the past 15 years has been awesome. Though I will be glad when the freeze is over so we can get back to having our patches just silently ignored when he does not like something rather than him having an excuse of the code freeze. =)
One of the shortcomings I see as I stated in my email the other day, I think we really missed the target on. I think some Office versions should have been a core requirement of 1.0. Even if it was Office 97 and 2000 working in 98 mode I think we should have been able to provide a nearly perfect experience out of the box. Or nearly out of the box as it were, with a little version tweaking. Office is a core pillar of Microsoft's monopoly and not making this a priority I feel misses the point of Wine for a lot of users.
Also I think the process can be refined a bit more for subsequent releases. Some of the developers I spoke with offline were unhappy about not having a public experimental branch that was blessed to continue development in. While they could privately do development and push and pull changes with git, not having a sanctioned experimental branch, I think slowed the overall processes of development down and did not really help with bug fixes enough to be warranted. Perhaps in the future we can maintain parallel lines of development before major releases. A good example is the Samba guys, they've been working on Samba 4 for ever, but the stable branch is still being constantly improved, better, newer stuff is being back ported and development continues on both tracks.
Finally I am still not really happy with the results of Winetest. I think we should have had dozens of people that could pass all of the tests months or even years before 1.0 shipped rather than just Alexandre's system being the only one that could do a perfect test run. Maybe we should have just asked him to mirror his setup and provide a list of every package and configuration option he uses so we could base target systems on that. Also I think we should have done something to insure new Wine tests always passed on a fixed version of Windows a lot sooner. James has done a lot of work to make all of the tests pass on Windows 2003 but I think we should have done this back in 2003 and said "every new test has to pass on Windows 2003" as well as Alexandre's box before it gets merged.
As far as 1.0 goes, its not perfect but its not horrible and I think we've learned quite a bit and Wine is better now than its ever been. I expect 1.1 or 1.2 whatever number Alexandre wants to call it, will be an exponential improvement given the experience we've gained.
And lastly I'd like to announce I am starting a new Free Software company with a long term goal of providing Products and Services around Wine and ReactOS. The Bordeaux Group has today released Bordeaux for Linux which builds on the infrastructure laid out in Wine 1.0, Winetricks, IES4Linux and other tools and tries to wrap them all together in a kind of CrossOver Lite type of environment. The ultimate goal is to help refine Wine more and aide in ReactOS development to create a platform that is generic so that users wanting to migrate away from Windows will have a more broad range of choices, be it Wine on Linux and the Mac, ReactOS, or even CrossOver, PlayOnLinux,WineDoors or some other Wine package.
Some of the (limited) work we've already done we hope to be able to fold back in to Winehq. If your interested check it out http://www.bordeauxgroup.com
Thanks
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 8:21 AM, Steven Edwards winehacker@gmail.com wrote:
And lastly I'd like to announce I am starting a new Free Software company with a long term goal of providing Products and Services around Wine and ReactOS. The Bordeaux Group has today released Bordeaux for Linux which builds on the infrastructure laid out in Wine 1.0, Winetricks, IES4Linux and other tools and tries to wrap them all together in a kind of CrossOver Lite type of environment. The ultimate goal is to help refine Wine more and aide in ReactOS development to create a platform that is generic so that users wanting to migrate away from Windows will have a more broad range of choices, be it Wine on Linux and the Mac, ReactOS, or even CrossOver, PlayOnLinux,WineDoors or some other Wine package.
Some of the (limited) work we've already done we hope to be able to fold back in to Winehq. If your interested check it out http://www.bordeauxgroup.com
I was looking at some of the source code, and some of your files don't have any copyright. Are the (L)GPL licensed?
-Austin
On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Austin English austinenglish@gmail.com wrote:
I was looking at some of the source code, and some of your files don't have any copyright. Are the (L)GPL licensed?
Yes if its something I've written then its LGPL, unless its something borrowed from another author, in that case, any patch remains under the terms of the orginal authors license which should be LGPL or GPL compatible. I'll try to fix the license headers and provide a detailed map of what software falls under what license in the next few days.
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Austin English -
Steven Edwards