On Friday February 8 2008 04:41:28 Bang Jun-young wrote:
That's the main reason why Wine keeps crashing every time I give it a try with my Windows apps. ... I see something fundamentally wrong with development process.
I think that current development process isn't a problem at all. In fact AJ is very good at what he is doing! As far as I understand your patch ("comctl32: Fix invalid syntax.") was rejected just because you forgot to add proper (descriptive) changelog entry. What is the real problem is the lack of testers (who report regressions and bugs) and developers. This is why WINE still has a lot of bugs, regressions are quite common thing to happen, etc. To fix this, more people should read wine-patches and test patches before they are committed, more people should write bug reports, more people should be involved in the development, and so on. Unfortunately, not all people have enough time for such tasks. However, WINE is pretty usable today.
Since 1993, Wine has never gotten to the point where everybody could rely on it for his daily work. It has as awfully many bugs as Win95.
WINE can work reliably even with very complex programs (such as Photoshop CS - I use it pretty often). And if you don't see BIG improvement in last years you either tried very few Windows programs or you are very unlucky... In my practice WINE run most of the programs I try (well, I didn't tried thousands of Windows programs and there is no "hardcore" gamers in my family so my statistic may be biased). In fact, it is so good that I typically can rely on it to run any program I'm downloading from the Internet (success rate for me is more than 85% for "small" and "average" programs/games downloadable for free from the Internet). And if Windows program(s) work correctly on WINE, cases of "random" crashes are very rare. They (generally) do exist but most of Windows programs aren't affected by such bugs - much more often you find repeatable crashes after specific sequence(s) of steps. And your statement "Wine has never gotten to the point where everybody could rely on it for his daily work" is strange. In fact it is true for Windows too (Windows never gotten to the point where everybody could rely on it for his daily work). Maybe you just mean that WINE doesn't work well for you and some (or maybe even most) other people? But working well for some people or for nobody is very different things... There is a lot of people who use WINE for their daily tasks. For example, I and whole my family use Linux and WINE on daily basis (because of dependency on some Windows software and Windows games). There is no Windows installed on our computers (only I have Windows XP in VMWare for my very specific purposes to run Autodesk products). In my practice WINE and Linux are absolutely stable (if no bugs in WINE triggered by the program of course). In fact, I have trading station for Windows working 24 hours per day on my Linux server with WINE (if trading station fail or crash, I potentially can lose real money). And for this purpose (which by definition requires high stability) WINE+Linux works MUCH better than Windows XP. And your comparison of WINE with Windows 95 isn't true at all. Did you actually ever tried to use Windows 95? It will fail MUCH more often than WINE, and WINE can run more Windows programs than Windows 95 (I have it in VMWare so I really tested this with some programs year ago or so, "just for fun"). Even Windows 98 cannot run many important programs such as Photoshop (it require at least Windows 2000). And Windows 95/98 have a LOT of "random" crashes; WINE is much better - for many programs it can work for months 24 hours per day without problems, and even if it crashes in some cases, other programs aren't affected (especially if they are launched from different prefix). Everything above is my personal experience, and for some users it may be worse. But for me, WINE work good enough for daily use, even for very important applications. So you can consider my story as yet-another-success-story-of-using-WINE. Obviously, this doesn't mean that WINE is good enough for everyone... But at least it is good enough for me, my family and some of my friends. There is some minor problems (for example, my brother have some games that don't work on WINE at all but he doesn't care very much about this) so WINE isn't perfect of course... But I just want to say that it is good enough for daily work and gaming at least for some people, and a lot of Windows software is usable on Linux with WINE. Personally, I think that AJ and all other WINE developers are doing very great and important work! Big thanks to all of them...