Article on wine development strategy

[Ben Klein]

2009/4/19 Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net>:
> On Sat, 18 Apr 2009 15:22:34 +0100
> Reece Dunn <msclrhd at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> That also brings up a good point as to why focusing on applications -
>> even those used by a large number of people - is only part of the
>> equation: every user is different.
>
> Happiness is a subjective state that depends as much on the user's expectations as it does on actual performance. I'd count myself as a mostly happy user, but I came in with fairly low expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Users with unreasonable expectations are always going to be frustrated.

I'm so happy with Wine that I volunteered (several times) to help keep
the Debian packages up-to-date. I've also submitted a couple of
patches, had quite a few bugs fixed, and been given admin capabilities
on AppDB (which is quite a compliment). I'm probably as happy as a
Wine user can get. The apps and games I use in Wine almost all work
100% the way I want.

Right now, there's one thing bugging me: bug 14939. If Dan (or others)
would like to implement a method of deferring S3TC texture
decompression to the appropriately licensed GPU, assuming there are no
legal issues with this, I'd be ecstatic. But I'm sure the D3D devs
have better things to do. :)

Note that some users get annoyed when a patch that fixes their problem
is rejected because it's a hacky hackish hack and would adversely
affect a lot of other apps. If we focus on one of these users, and try
to make them happy, should we break a bunch of stuff just for them? I
think Wine is making excellent progress in supporting win32 apps with
the current development model. And of course, if it ain't broke ...