Versions & mass-appeal

[Andreas Mohr]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 10:00:08AM -0400, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> On October 30, 2002 08:56 am, Andreas Mohr wrote:
> > Thus you could encounter an app which manages to trash your whole
> > filesystem ANY DAY; this app simply needs to use a very rarely used
> > function that we barely implemented... BOOM.
> 
> Andy, this is just crap, and it's the type of crap that we should
> not perpetuate. There are tons of reasons why this _never_ happens,
> and you know them. So let's not propagate this type of misinformation
> that we have already too much out there, and which hurts us undoubtedly.
"Never" ?
Never is never a perfectly fitting word...

I for one *have* heard in some admittedly rather *rare* cases of data
corruption due to Wine (something like deleting the parent directory
instead of the program directory due to skipping one level in directory
hierarchy in some function due to a problem).
-- oops, whole Wine drive content gone (in a worst-case scenario).
(also, there's that well-known Explorer renaming issue, which is *not* a Wine
problem but happens on Wine due to braindead Microsoft programming)

Crap is also a rather bold word (which admittedly I also use quite often
- shame on me :). I'd say almost all of my text was based on facts
that may happen sometimes, thus it could hardly be called crap.

I don't want to spread the perception that Wine is unsafe - in by far
almost all cases it's definitely not. But people should keep in mind
that for every new program that they install, there might still be a bug
lurking in some rarely used function that this program uses,
which could in some cases cause some... err... problems with data.

But most well-known programs have been tested quite a lot already, 
so the chance something like that happens with a well-known program
is pretty slim to none, of course.

And given that even W2K or XP have strange filesystem problems when used
with an excessive amount of files sometimes, this leads me to believe that
Wine isn't that bad after all...

After all:
Software == Heap o' Bugs :)

-- 
Andreas Mohr                        Stauferstr. 6, D-71272 Renningen, Germany
Tel. +49 7159 800604                http://mohr.de.tt