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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