World Wine News

This week, 239 posts consumed 279 K. There were 32 different contributors. 18 (56%) posted more than once. 11 (34%) posted last week too.

The top 5 posters of the week were:

1. 9 posts in 11K by julliard at winehq.org (Alexandre Julliard)
2. 7 posts in 9K by jwhite at codeweavers.com (Jeremy White)
3. 6 posts in 6K by hverbeet at gmail.com (Henri Verbeet)
4. 6 posts in 7K by nsivov at codeweavers.com (Nikolay Sivov)
5. 6 posts in 8K by nerv at dawncrow.de (André Hentschel)

Wine is an accepted organization for GSoC 2014, would-be students should now submit project proposals at google-melange.com . See the timeline to learn how much time is left.

See our Wiki for more informations and project ideas.

Valve has open sourced their DirectX to OpenGL translator named ToGL . The media and even some developers wondered if this is useful for Wine. Stefan Dösinger had a quick look at the code and gave an answer:

Jeremy White finally got annoyed enough by the remaining test failures on Windows and pushed people to fix them. This also had the effect of making other developers afraid of getting shamed and so they too fixed test failures :)

We already made good progress, but there are some strange behaviours of Windows, other hard to analyze failures and problems caused by the way the WineTestBot works. It seems often enough we trigger corner cases in Qemu and upgraded raises even worth problems, so we need to trace them down and fix them.

But what is Wine testing on Windows you might ask, here is a short answer. Well, the Windows API is a huge set of functions, to replicate them we need to know how they work without disassembling them (and MSDN is mostly wrong). So we write tests. A test calls a function and checks e.g. the return value, if that value is not expected then this is a failure. We run the tests on different Windows Versions and on Wine, that means the chance of getting a non-expected value is good.:)

In the end the benefits of our test suite are:

• Documentation of the Windows API behavior.
• Making sure the Wine implementation conforms to the Windows behavior.
• Detect and prevent Wine regressions.

See our Wiki for more information.

In 2009 Gé (Greg) van Geldorp introduced the WineTestBot, a set VMware ESX VMs running various Windows versions. As he worked for VMware, the system was mostly based on their technology.

WineTestBot even lured developers to contribute to Wine, e.g. Peter Rosin (a libtool contributor):

Sadly Gé passed away 2011, but he asked his brother Arno to run the WineTestBot for some more years. So early last month Jeremy White wrote at wine-devel:

Mostly for licensing reasons François Gouget redid all the work based on libvirt and Qemu. Now that the old WineTestBot is turned off, the new one is running at testbot.winehq.org and is also the one used for the Patches list . Thanks François for all the hard work!

So let these words from the Wine 1.4 Announcement express our gratitude:

*Disclaimer: These lists of changes are automatically generated by information entered into the AppDB. These results are subject to the opinions of the users submitting application reviews. The Wine community does not guarantee that even though an application may be upgraded to 'Gold' or 'Platinum' in this list, that you will have the same experience and would provide a similar rating.