Code quality (was Re: comctl32: Fix invalid syntax)

[L. Rahyen]

On Friday February 8 2008 04:41:28 Bang Jun-young wrote:
> That's the main reason why Wine keeps crashing every time I give it a
> try with my Windows apps.
> ...
> I see something fundamentally wrong with  development process. 

	I think that current development process isn't a problem at all. In fact AJ 
is very good at what he is doing!
	As far as I understand your patch ("comctl32: Fix invalid syntax.") was 
rejected just because you forgot to add proper (descriptive) changelog entry.
	What is the real problem is the lack of testers (who report regressions and 
bugs) and developers. This is why WINE still has a lot of bugs, regressions 
are quite common thing to happen, etc. To fix this, more people should read 
wine-patches and test patches before they are committed, more people should 
write bug reports, more people should be involved in the development, and so 
on. Unfortunately, not all people have enough time for such tasks.
	However, WINE is pretty usable today.

> Since 1993, Wine has never gotten to the
> point where everybody could rely on it for his daily work. It has as
> awfully many bugs as Win95.

	WINE can work reliably even with very complex programs (such as Photoshop 
CS - I use it pretty often). And if you don't see BIG improvement in last 
years you either tried very few Windows programs or you are very unlucky...
	In my practice WINE run most of the programs I try (well, I didn't tried 
thousands of Windows programs and there is no "hardcore" gamers in my family 
so my statistic may be biased). In fact, it is so good that I typically can 
rely on it to run any program I'm downloading from the Internet (success 
rate for me is more than 85% for "small" and "average" programs/games 
downloadable for free from the Internet). And if Windows program(s) work 
correctly on WINE, cases of "random" crashes are very rare. They (generally) 
do exist but most of Windows programs aren't affected by such bugs - much 
more often you find repeatable crashes after specific sequence(s) of steps.
	And your statement "Wine has never gotten to the point where everybody could 
rely on it for his daily work" is strange. In fact it is true for Windows too 
(Windows never gotten to the point where everybody could rely on it for his 
daily work). Maybe you just mean that WINE doesn't work well for you and some 
(or maybe even most) other people? But working well for some people or for 
nobody is very different things... There is a lot of people who use WINE for 
their daily tasks.
	For example, I and whole my family use Linux and WINE on daily basis (because 
of dependency on some Windows software and Windows games). There is no 
Windows installed on our computers (only I have Windows XP in VMWare for my 
very specific purposes to run Autodesk products).
	In my practice WINE and Linux are absolutely stable (if no bugs in WINE 
triggered by the program of course). In fact, I have trading station for 
Windows working 24 hours per day on my Linux server with WINE (if trading 
station fail or crash, I potentially can lose real money). And for this 
purpose (which by definition requires high stability) WINE+Linux works 
MUCH better than Windows XP.
	And your comparison of WINE with Windows 95 isn't true at all. Did you 
actually ever tried to use Windows 95? It will fail MUCH more often than 
WINE, and WINE can run more Windows programs than Windows 95 (I have it in 
VMWare so I really tested this with some programs year ago or so, "just for 
fun"). Even Windows 98 cannot run many important programs such as Photoshop 
(it require at least Windows 2000). And Windows 95/98 have a LOT of "random" 
crashes; WINE is much better - for many programs it can work for months 24 
hours per day without problems, and even if it crashes in some cases, other 
programs aren't affected (especially if they are launched from different 
prefix).
	Everything above is my personal experience, and for some users it may be 
worse. But for me, WINE work good enough for daily use, even for very 
important applications. So you can consider my story as 
yet-another-success-story-of-using-WINE.
	Obviously, this doesn't mean that WINE is good enough for everyone... But at 
least it is good enough for me, my family and some of my friends. There is 
some minor problems (for example, my brother have some games that don't work 
on WINE at all but he doesn't care very much about this) so WINE isn't 
perfect of course... But I just want to say that it is good enough for daily 
work and gaming at least for some people, and a lot of Windows software is 
usable on Linux with WINE.
	Personally, I think that AJ and all other WINE developers are doing very 
great and important work! Big thanks to all of them...