The upcoming 1.0 and announcing Bordeaux for Linux

[Steven Edwards]

Hello All,
I mentioned the other day in the noise about the upcoming 1.0 and the
short comings I felt it had. Others have commented quite a bit on the
subject already and so I'll be pretty brief. I think the 1.0 process
while its been slow has been a good even with its shortcomings. Like
with everything its a learning process and hopefully we will be able
to tweak the process further for 1.x releases.

On the positive side, I think that Dan has done a great job as release
manager, maintaining the bug lists, working on winetest, staying on
top of all the tips and tricks needed to make Valgrind really useful
and maintaining winetricks. I'm also really glad that Alexandre did a
lot of refinement to the winetest infrastructure, everything he has
done with the Wine infrastructure leading up to this point and frankly
for everything he's done for Wine for the past 15 years has been
awesome. Though I will be glad when the freeze is over so we can get
back to having our patches just silently ignored when he does not like
something rather than him having an excuse of the code freeze. =)

One of the shortcomings I see as I stated in my email the other day, I
think we really missed the target on. I think some Office versions
should have been a core requirement of 1.0. Even if it was Office 97
and 2000 working in 98 mode I think we should have been able to
provide a nearly perfect experience out of the box. Or nearly out of
the box as it were, with a little version tweaking. Office is a core
pillar of Microsoft's monopoly and not making this a priority I feel
misses the point of Wine for a lot of users.

Also I think the process can be refined a bit more for subsequent
releases. Some of the developers I spoke with offline were unhappy
about not having a public experimental branch that was blessed to
continue development in. While they could privately do development and
push and pull changes with git, not having a sanctioned experimental
branch, I think slowed the overall processes of development down and
did not really help with bug fixes enough to be warranted. Perhaps in
the future we can maintain parallel lines of development before major
releases. A good example is the Samba guys, they've been working on
Samba 4 for ever, but the stable branch is still being constantly
improved, better, newer stuff is being back ported and development
continues on both tracks.

Finally I am still not really happy with the results of Winetest. I
think we should have had dozens of people that could pass all of the
tests months or even years before 1.0 shipped rather than just
Alexandre's system being the only one that could do a perfect test
run. Maybe we should have just asked him to mirror his setup and
provide a list of every package and configuration option he uses so we
could base target systems on that. Also I think we should have done
something to insure new Wine tests always passed on a fixed version of
Windows a lot sooner. James has done a lot of work to make all of the
tests pass on Windows 2003 but I think we should have done this back
in 2003 and said "every new test has to pass on Windows 2003" as well
as Alexandre's box before it gets merged.

As far as 1.0 goes, its not perfect but its not horrible and I think
we've learned quite a bit and Wine is better now than its ever been. I expect
1.1 or 1.2 whatever number Alexandre wants to call it, will be an
exponential improvement given the experience we've gained.

And lastly I'd like to announce I am starting a new Free Software
company with a long term goal of providing Products and Services
around Wine and ReactOS. The Bordeaux Group has today released
Bordeaux for Linux which builds on the infrastructure laid out in Wine
1.0, Winetricks, IES4Linux and other tools and tries to wrap them all
together in a kind of CrossOver Lite type of environment. The ultimate
goal is to help refine Wine more and aide in ReactOS development to
create a platform that is generic so that users wanting to migrate
away from Windows will have a more broad range of choices, be it Wine
on Linux and the Mac, ReactOS, or even CrossOver,
PlayOnLinux,WineDoors or some other Wine package.

Some of the (limited) work we've already done we hope to be able to
fold back in to Winehq. If your interested check it out
http://www.bordeauxgroup.com

Thanks

-- 
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