Wineconf follow up: Wine Usage Data Collection

[Henri Verbeet]

2008/10/9 Zachary Goldberg <zgold at bluesata.com>:
> And yes I do think this data would be valuable.  Especially for the
> d3d people who have a very rough idea of what to focus on (from what
> they've told us at wineconf).
>
That's not quite what Stefan said, actually. The issue is that while
there are obviously some games that are very popular like World of
Warcraft, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, etc., there simply isn't a
single application that almost everyone runs. Another issue is that
compared to regular applications, games have a relatively short
lifespan. If a game remains popular for an entire year that's a
relatively long time already. So it's not so much that we don't know
what to focus on, but rather that it makes more sense to work on
things like "fix surface management" or "implement dualhead" than on
"make Red Alert 3 work perfectly", although those aren't mutually
exclusive, of course. You also have to consider that debugging a
problem often takes just as much or more time as implementing a fix,
which is a bit of a waste if you already know there are parts of the
code that have problems which will probably cause a bug in some
application.