How are we doing?

[Mike Hearn]

On 5/30/06, Dmitry Timoshkov <dmitry at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> I can't believe that writing a good test case showing the bug and adding
> it to the Wine test harness is such hard thing to do for a good Windows
> developer who already knows what he expects from a particular Win32 API.

But most developers who come to Wine are not Windows developers, they
are Linux developers who want to run an app or game. Often finding the
bug is much harder than fixing it these days. It takes practice to
learn how to read a relay trace or debug a mysterious crash.

There is documentation showing how to do this with examples but I
guess it could go further.

> Once the test is in the Wine tree that becomes *much* easier to pinpoint
> the bug and decide what is the real fix for it.

Yes, sometimes. Some things are hard to show with unit tests. Consider
the case of "I run my game and the audio glitches". It turned out that
for some people that was due to scheduling problems and a fix is to
use POSIX capabilities to add SetThreadPriority support to the
wineserver. For somebody new to Wine that would be a very difficult
problem to track down and fix, and hard to unit test.

I agree that proving a problem using a test is a good way to start for
many bugs however, especially message related ones.

thanks -mike