Directx9

[Joerg Mayer]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 01:55:19PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> 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.

While this point will come eventually, it has not been reached: ANNOUNCE
starts as follows:

> This is release 20040813 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on
> Unix.  This is still a developers only release.  There are many bugs
> and unimplemented features.  Most applications still do not work
> correctly.

As long as it's "a developers only release", there is *absolutely no reason"
why developers should not be allowed to break things for a while. Also,
please consider how often Alexandre rejects patches not because they would
not be an improvement, but because they should be improved even more.
*That* would also have to change once you start talking about making
releases that are truly intended for users. Honestly, I don't think that
this time has come already - and from my point of view, this may remain
for quite a while. Those users who feel differently currently have the
option the use wine versions that have been developed/modified for user-
use: Codewavers and Transgamings wine flavours.

Once Wine is declared to be ready for "ordinary users", the development
process should indeed change. A good example on how to continue is KDE:
Currently, development is done in two different branches: HEAD and
3_3_BRANCH: In HEAD developers are free to develop things, add new things
(and occasionally break things: HEAD doesn't even compile from time to
time). 3_3_BRANCH must be stable, changes to it a reviewed etc. IMO,
this would also be a good way for wine, once it's considered to be
sufficiently stable and feature "complete".

  Ciao
     Joerg
-- 
Joerg Mayer                                           <jmayer at loplof.de>
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that
works. Some say that should read Microsoft instead of technology.