Lots of regressions in games in last few versions

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Marcel Partap <mpartap at gmx.net> wrote:
>  Attracting users by promising a major step forward - a finished x.0 release
> - that don't already come to wine by other means may backfire - a zillion
> useless bug reports, fed up newbies, many 'ruined' first-foss-contact
> chances

We should make it very clear in each and every announcement we
make that Wine 1.0 will NOT run most windows programs, and link
to the list of 1000 apps it probably runs well.  I've certainly tried
to emphasize its limitations every time I open my mouth in public.

>  And I really don't think it is going to be of advantage to the code, too.
> ..more bug reports - what for? There's enough unfixed bugs, enough people
> involved hitting bugs, only too few people with the capability to fix them
> and i doubt calling wine 1.0 will attract more developers that are skilled
> enough to contribute code of a quality mr julliard is willing to commit.

There are probably lots of bugs in, say, Photoshop CS2
that I'd get fixed right quick if I knew about them, but not
enough people are using it to know they're there.
And even bug reports that sit around unfixed can end up
useful when somebody finally takes an interest in a problem.

>  Relax the code freeze a bit and stay in RC phase for as many releases as
> the beta phase..?

That's like saying "don't do the 1.0 release yet, just keep doing
0.9.62, etc..."
Not going to happen.  Wine needs a release.  All good open source
projects need to release (not just make snapshots) periodically.
Our last one was several years ago, and by doing a release, we are
cleaning up a lot of bugs that have been lingering and annoying users
for years.  (Serial I/O, anyone?  DOS apps?)
- Dan