Governance revisited

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Jim,

On 9/22/06, Jim White <jim at pagesmiths.com> wrote:

> Steven cited the business at Wineconf of Alexandre never being "proved
> wrong on a technical matter".  Another straw man.  The part of
> Alexandre's patch process that is the root of this conflict between Wine
> development-focused developers vs. Wine user-focused developers is that
> which consists of style and aesthetic considerations.


If you want to add a compatibility hack that works for some apps and breaks
others then yes its a straw man argument. If you want to have an api
implemented properly without anymore compatibility hacks than what Windows
itself implements then the current method is the correct one. We've put a
lot of effort in to making the Wine user-focus less of a pain. Winecfg has
been developed by many developers who are active contributors. Brian Vincent
has written 250+ pages of a book on using Wine and the results of his
writting have added other developers in areas in finding where we need to
make configuration less of a pain. Supporting aesthetic considerations is
one thing to say if your talking about a aesthetic consistent platform like
Mac OS X. Dealing with Linux with virtually unlimited window managers,
styles, themes, etc..ad nauseam...its is a whole different matter.

CodeWeavers Wine version is full of patches that Alexandre won't accept
> for WineHQ.  Obvious proof that the Alexandre's policy isn't the only
> way to make a Wine that people value.  In fact it proves that the
> WineHQ's patch process is not good enough to make Wine that people will
> pay for, while CodeWeavers' is.


Correct. But while CrossOver Office does contain some hacks in the interest
of getting a shipping product out the door with a finite amount of developer
time, others use stock Wine with very little tweaking already. Case in point
CodeWeavers and Google. As far as I remember there are no hacks that Picasa
uses that are not in stock Wine. We have a custom installer and a custom
package for running that one application really well but make no mistake
about it, picasa should always work on stock Winehq as far as I know. I did
not work on that project but I seem to recall all of that. Wine is never
going to be able to run EVERYTHING out of the box. If you want that then you
need VMware or something. CrossOver adds some spit and polish for a few apps
but make no mistake about it. At Wineconf I overheard Jeremy White say at
least three times he wished we just did a package of Wine with even less of
our value add.

What you and others are asking for is the right to add broken hacks for the
sake of user experience. We tried that before with the richedit control
which was just a dummy wrapper around the edit control. What happened? No
one worked on it for like three years until one of CodeWeavers employees got
fed up and in his spare time wrote tests, recruited others and did a lot of
the grunt work himself to get work on a proper richedit started. Should we
sacrifice more infrastructure for the sake of a few quick hacks for a few
applications?

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is
an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
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