My Wineconf 2006 trip report

[Marcus Meissner]

Hi folks,

I had to write it up for my dear colleagues anyway, so here
my notes... Feel free to reuse as you like.

Attendance was around 35 people, all developers.

Location was the university campus of Reading, a lecture hall in the
Agriculture Department.

The conference was organized by CodeWeavers, but sponsored by mostly
2 donors of each 1000 (?) US$ to the Wine project, one private person and
a Poker website (strange enough).

Around 10 - 15 developers were CodeWeavers employees, the other were
volunteer developers.

1. Keynote by Alexandre Julliard (CW)

   Alexandre Julliard, our resident dictator and lone committer held
   the keynote.

   - The beta (0.9.*) works out fine.
     The 2 month code freeze before Beta has helped, and bugs got
     nicely pruned.

     The bugzilla stat char showed a nice increase in reported and
     also in fixed bugs.

   - Wine 1.0 plans

     Code Freeze perhaps later this year, for several months, then 1.0
     release early next year.

   - Post 1.0 

     Unclear. Likely will have a stable and a feature branch.

   - GIT 

     GIT is working out nicely.

     Number of monthly (?) commits grew from 400 at the turnover point
     to around 700 now.

     Reasons:
     * More smaller and confined patches (also thanks to GIT allowing
       incremental local commits).

     * GIT patch submission is in one defined patch format.
       
       Earlier patches were occcasionaly generated from subdirectories,
       misformatted, hand edited or similar.

       GIT changes this to one defined format, making his work easier.

     * "Developers might not like it, but I do".

    - Goals for 1.0

      * Better Game Support (DirectX).
        This is pretty much heavy work in progress currently.

      * Regressiontests, Documentation are fine as-is.

      * Copy Protection support for Games etc.
        Necessary to run lots of games. However this is not a release
        stopper.

    - LOC still increasing, around 1.800.000 now.


- COM (Component Object Model) report by Rob Shearman (CW)

  Rob (and others) spent most of last year enhancing and fixing the COM,
  OLE and RPCRT parts of WINE and summarized it.

  The out of process COM used by InstallShield has seen lots of changes
  and is working much better now.

  Work on remote COM was necessary for Outlook which talks COM via RPC
  over TCP sockets with the Outlook server.


- GIT Tutorial by Mike McCormack (CW)

  Not WINE specific, so no details.

- cxtest by Martin Pilka (CW)

  cxtest is the ongoing developed GUI testing kit from Codeweavers.

  Basic idea is that it can generate keypresses, mouseclicks and similar
  things and then captures images at various intervals and compares them
  with previous runs.

  Needs review of problems, but has definitely spotted some already.


- Google's use of WINE by Dan Kegel (Google)

  2 major Windows applications that wanted a Linux port.

  - Picasa

    Requirement: _No_ Windows binary code change.

    Hired Codeweavers as company to fix issues:
    - lots of bugfixes
    - IWebBrowser implementation
    - File change notification (implemented with inotify)
    - Video Codec handling fixes (both in MSVIDEO and DSHOW)
    - However: Needed to disable CD Burning Module of Picasa.

    Works on almost all distros nicely.
  
  - Google Earth

    WINE has OpenGL-in-Window problems, otherwise this might
    have been a WINE job too likely.

    The Loki Installer guy (Brad something?) did the port on-site (this
    1 person did the port).

    Exposes lots of OpenGL / GFX card related related problems.

    -> But received more press and recognition.

  No other Windows applications of Google need to be ported
  currently. (Google Desktop would be one, but it requires
  integration into native browsers, so it is too Windows specific.)

  Dan also oversees 4 Google interns working on Wine.


- CrossOver on Mac by Andrew Bogott (CW)

  Beta on MacOS/X (Intel) of CrossOver Office available.
  Andrew demoed MS Excel, including installation of it.

  GUI toolkit is in TCL + Coco (? graphical Mac scripting language)
  
  Use X11 graphics driver, Quartz driver is currently being considered.

  Caused stability problems with Mac Kernel.
  Caused stability problems with Mac X Server.
  Is slower than on Linux due to lack of some fast methods we use on Linux
  (I guess something like threading, futexes or so. -Marcus)


- Governance breakout session

  The point sometimes comes up whether to replace Alexandre.
  
  The present developers did not agree, so there was not much discussion.

  We evaluated _why_ they want it:

  - They want low quality hacks into the tree to make apps work.

    This is a no go, you need to fix it right.

  - They get no reply on their submission _why_ it was rejected.

    True reason, we discussed a bit how to improve.
    - A bot welcoming new patch posters?
    - checks for most common problem, // comments
    - people actively taking care of areas and responding to people
    - Alexandre waiting for comments from those responsibles on difficult
      patches

  - Branch Maintainership post 1.0 ... 

    Briefly touched, but we will see when we get there.


- Packaging breakout session

  Its unclear (to me at least) what is wanted ;)

  Paul Millar wants nightly regression tests (cxtest runs with downloaded
  binaries?)
  Some want nightly builds.
  Some want .spec files in a central repository.

  Marcus is trying to bring up RPM builds for SUSE, Mandriva 2006.0, Fedora
  Core 4 and 5 on the openSUSE buildservice. Debian to come.

Ciao, Marcus