We *really* need a development model change !

[Francois Gouget]

   I wholeheartedly agree with you.

   I think that both approaches (application oriented, and API oriented)
are necessary.

 * We need the application oriented approach because this makes Wine
useful to people now. But maybe we should focus more on specific
applications: getting a few applications working very well seems more
interesting to me than getting a lot of applications kind of working.
The reason is that people migrating from the Windows world don't want
applications that kind of work, they want to see stuff that works just
as well as on Windows, even if it is limited to a few applications.
 * We also need the test framework but not only for regression testing.
All you need to write tests is a Windows computer so we could probably
get the help of people who would otherwise not contribute to Wine
(windows programmers who feel intimidated by contributing to Wine). And
these tests look like a great way to find bugs in our current
implementations: I am quite sure that with just a couple of hours of
coding tests you could find quite a few bugs that may otherwise take you
days to track down in a relay trace.
   But as Alexandre said, tact is needed when soliciting the help of
windows programmers so that this is not seen as blatant spam.


   I also like your section about why Wine is worth contributing to. It
may need some polishing but it would be nice to have it on WineHQ. After
all, WineHQ may tell you what Wine is but there is not a single word
about why it is important and why it is worth contributing to. We keep
hearing about how Wine is bad for Linux, how we should all stop wasting
our time and contribute to native Linux applications instead, how Linux
has all the applications it needs anyway, etc., etc. No wonder! We don't
even tell our side of the story!


   Also we need to have a framework in place so that we can handle the
sudden downpour of help we are going to receive ;-) Well, even if it's
not such a massive number of contributions. We need:
 * someone to organize things (and unfortunately no-one seems to have
the time, please, someone, volunteer!)
 * a mechanism to track which APIs already have tests in place and which
don't. Sure there are 12000 APIs so the risk of overlap seems small, but
I am quite sure that the distribution of submissions will not be random.
 * something to do a 'make test' and report which tests suceeded and
which failed
 * we also need to decide how to write these tests. You seem inclined to
write them in C but there has been some work before to create a
framework in perl. I consider that both have pros and cons and all I
care about at this point is that we do finally get something in place.



--
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
      Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
                            -- from some indian guy