Revised menu patch

Mike Hearn m.hearn at signal.QinetiQ.com
Wed Sep 8 09:20:38 CDT 2004


> > Until then, many 
> > Delphi apps won't work. For me, this is not acceptable.
> 
> 
> For me, it's not acceptable to debate an inclusion of a not acceptable
> solution, there were enough explanations why it's not acceptable. You are
> welcome to fix it properly though.
> 
> Please don't take my words offensively, Wine is a huge project, and it's
> very critical to do the right things in the long run. Last time I heared,
> Ulrich Czekalla had a preliminary patch which has moved menu handle allocation
> to wineserver. I'm not sure in what state the patch is currently.

Michael,

When this sort of thing happens, it boils down to a judgement call on 
the part of Alexandre. He has to decide:

- What is the cost of putting in this known-incorrect fix?
- What are the benefits?

Now sometimes Alexandre does allow in incorrect fixes because the cost 
is low and the benefit is high, or because he knows a correct fix is a 
long time away (maybe never). Most of our DCOM code falls into this 
category :)

In this case, he has to decide:

- Will this fix actually break other programs?
- Will its presence make development of a correct fix more unlikely?
- Are the programs it fixes popular enough to warrant it?

This is all part of figuring out the cost and the benefit. In this case, 
I have no idea what he will think. Alexandre does tend to be 
conservative - ie dropping patches he isn't sure about rather than 
accept them and hoping for the best.

Wine has been around for a very long time, and correctness is very 
important simply because if you don't consider it, nearly every fix you 
make will break something else and you end up going round and round in 
mad circles constantly moving but never getting nearer to the goal of 
100% compatibility.

Even given a large and growing test suite, huge numbers of testers, a 
conservative maintainer and so on, Wine still suffers a high rate of 
regressions.

Now, I don't know anything about the menu code, so I'm not going to 
comment on whether the patch should go in or not. I think given how 
popular Delphi is for writing apps the cost of not including it is quite 
high but if the fix is clearly going to cause problems then we have no 
choice but to wait for Ulrichs menu->wineserver patch.

So hopefully you understand better the factors that go into these 
decisions. I know what you must be thinking, I've been there before with 
things like the system tray patch which is still not committed because 
it extends incorrect code rather than rewrites it but eventually you 
realise that in the long term it's for the best.

thanks -mike



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