wintab32 (from CrossOver Office)

[Jeremy White]

No, our policy is not to be particularly secretive; we
particularly don't want to waste anyones time, ever.
There is so much to do that any inefficiency is 
anathema to us.

We just goofed.

In fact, Alexandre often goes out of his way to spot
cases where someone is working on something we're
also working on, and tries to make sure that there
is no wasted effort.  You can use the NPTL work
as one example, and there were also some critical 
Photoshop install bugs that were fixed in WineHQ
because Alexandre noticed someone needed them.

Also, we did discuss Rob's work before
Aric started on Wintab.  We noted he'd said he was working
on it, but we hadn't seen any patches or heard
anything further (afair, his last email was November), 
so we assumed he hadn't had time.

The rude thing we did was failed to send an email
to Rob with a heads up/gut check with him on the
status.  If it helps, Aric feels terrible about it.

Now, I will say, we do like to hold our development
tree separate while we're working on it.  This is in
part just so we can stabilize around a release, but
it's also in part so we can get a big 'publicity'
splash around new features.  

I know that Chris poked at the system tray support,
but didn't get very far, and we pulled him
to attacking other things in the hopes that Mike Hearn
would get the XEMBED support done...

Candidly, we often see other peoples work and think
'ooooh, I hope we can get that into CrossOver X.X',
but we feel that it would be rude to tell you to
hurry up and get XEMBED done so we can ship 2.1 <grin>.

I do have to admit that I think we've done a pretty
poor job of interacting with wine-devel, sometimes.
We just had a big discussion on IRC about it.

We're reluctant to do our development 'in the open'
(i.e. submit our patches as we work on them).  

I should be clear - the developers are cheerful
to do that, but Management is not comfortable.
We really do live and die by our CrossOver Sales;
we're just barely making enough money to keep doing
what we're doing (and some months, not even that), 
and we worry that if WineHQ starts having all of our 
'good stuff' before we can make a splash with it, it 
will harm us.  It nearly happened to us just now; ELX Linux
announced Photoshop 7 support before cxoffice 2.0
(luckily they didn't get much press).

Also, we're really not all that secretive.  We've
been telling pretty much anyone who wants to know
that we were working on Photoshop, Access, and
Office XP.  Next is the Macromedia stuff...
We're small, so we do change direction when a paying 
customer waves money at us, but we try to be pretty open.  
Just ask <grin>

We're debating now how to do better.  And we're
open to suggestions.  Ideas?

In fact, I'd like to know if there are more simmering
complaints out there.  If there is anything else
we've done that pissed someone off, but they were
too polite to mention it, let us know.

I'd rather we intentionally pissed people off
than did it by accident <grin>.

Cheers,

Jeremy


On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 10:24, Mike Hearn wrote:
> This is a very large amount of code, it's slightly concerning to me that
> apparently nothing was said about this before despite the fact that
> Robert North said he was working on it.
> 
> Is it CodeWeavers policy not to reveal what new features are being added
> until the code is merged? In particular, I'm now left wondering whether
> or not the system tray in CX Office has XEMBED support (as this bug is
> highly user visible for non-kde users, so it might have been a candidate
> for a fix) - at some point once I've finished my current project and
> resolved a few ActiveX painting bugs I'm going to try and implement
> XEMBED support for the system tray, but I don't want to waste my time if
> it's already been implemented by CodeWeavers.
> 
> thanks -mike
> 
> On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 15:01, Aric Stewart wrote:
> > Changelog:
> > 
> >    Adds wintab32 support using XInput. Merged from CrossOver Office.
> > 
> > I am including this on the wine-devel list because there was discussion 
> > and comment about it there.
> > 
> > -aric
>