Time-based releases idea

[Alexandre Julliard]

"Dan Kegel" <dank at kegel.com> writes:

> That wasn't the distro; that was an upstream kernel vulnerability fix
> announced in February,
> http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Patching_CVE-2008-0600_Local_Root_Exploit

It's the distro that changed the mmap config, not the kernel. I'm not
sure I understand their reasoning, apparently this was an attempt to
work around the vulnerability without fixing the kernel. My point is
that if they cared about Wine they would have taken into account the
fact that it got broken, and hopefully found a different way of
addressing the issue.

>> we are better off releasing after a major distro release so
>> that we have a chance to find and fix the latest breakages first.
>
> If we want to catch breakages like the recent one early, we shouldn't
> wait for the distros; we should run Wine with each new release of
> the Linux kernel.

That doesn't help. Of all the breakages we've had over the years very
few were caused by the kernel; most were caused by distros shipping
unstable and untested packages, or broken default configs.

>>  It's still very much a feature-based model, only of course the desirable
>>  features have been shifting as Microsoft shipped new stuff and people
>>  wanted to run new apps before we supported the old ones properly...
>
> You assert Wine's releases will be feature-based, but
> I don't understand your reasoning yet.

Making a stable release is a lot of work, particularly since given the
nature of Wine it's very hard to test it properly and make sure we are
not breaking things. We don't want to go through the process unless we
have some significant features to release, and significant features
can't be developed on a fixed time frame.

For instance, one feature we'd want in 1.2 is the DIB engine; nobody can
guarantee that it will be ready, tested, and debugged properly by
September. I'd much prefer to ship 1.2 with a working DIB engine say in
December, than with a broken one in September.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org