Wine growth (was Re: REMOVE ME)

[Mike Hearn]

> Everyone else - I think it's time to update the counters on the web 
> site. They are horribly out of date. Wine has experienced a wonderful 
> expansion over the past year, but this means that we can no longer claim 
> that wine-devel is 25 msg/day (more like 35msg/day on my unofficial 
> counting), nor wine-patches 8msg/day (more like 20msg/day). This growth 
> is really impressive, but we really need to update the counters accordingly.

wine-patches 20msg/day? That's a lot, how did you arrive at that value?
It varies a lot, I guess patch dumps from companies push up the average,
but I'd say 8 a day is probably closer to the mark.

> I have been walking around with the feeling that wine is reaching it's 
> growth flex point (where development suddenly accelerates) for quite 
> some time. Comparing the numbers claimed on wine-patches to the real 
> numbers shows over 100% of growth in the amounts of fixes people send 
> in.  This shows that we are finally heading torwards the so desired beta 
> stage.....

Well, I think Wine is going to hit the "sweet spot" soon, where as
desktop Linux moves onwards, the speed Wine moves matches, then exceeds
the speed the Win32 APIs move. Mostly these days when an app crashes in
Wine, at least for me, it's mostly bugs in the code rather than missing
code (ignoring stuff like directx). 

Partly it's that Redmond are now focussing on .NET, but luckily Mono is
taking care of that side. Work on the Win32 APIs seemed to have slowed a
bit lately, the new things in XP were most notably in the non-essential
dept, stuff like window transparency and theming.

Anyway, before we can claim to be in beta, I think we need to get at
least most of the way to Dimis 0.9 targets for ease of use. Playing with
a raw WineHQ install the other day was a bit depressing in terms of how
many apps worked out of the box. The config applets, the supported
applications list etc, all need to be done.

I must admit, one thing that concerns me is that if all the targets for
0.9 are met, then WineHQ will suddenly be a much stronger competitor for
CodeWeavers. The thought has crossed my mind that perhaps Wine actually
benefits from being hard to use... I sincerely hope I'm wrong :(