Directx9

[Mike Hearn]

> Well, why could we not live with DX8 / DX9 breakage for some time ? At the
> time D3D was resurected, it was broken for most of the time (and probably
> still is :-) ).
> 
> And if someone disappears from development, it's just more motivations for
> others to pick up the work and continue (which would be more problematic
> with branches as this branch, if unmaintained, could really wither away
> without anyone working on it).

Yes, this is true. But I think this isn't the direction we want to go in.

At *some* point we have to stop simply releasing CVS snapshots which may 
or may not work/run important apps/eat your hard disk and actually do 
proper releases that are, you know, tested'n'stuff.

Trivial example that's causing people problems today: apparently winecfg 
eats your drive configuration. People install wine, encounter this 
suggestively named "winecfg" program, run it, and now they get the 
dreaded C:\\Windows is not accessible error.

Anyway. Yes. Releases.

If we as a project are committed to doing 0.9, 1.0+ releases it means we 
can't simply break code people are using to play their games for months 
at a time and shrug it off. What other projects do this? I can't think 
of any.

For most projects CVS is CVS and is where stuff is broken then fixed, 
and releases are what users install. They are expected to not ship with 
important features missing.

Other projects typically use branches to deal with this, or in the case 
of the kernel fork off into separate projects that just maintain huge 
differentials which are folded back in when complete. So what do we do?

thanks -mike