[Wine] Hypothetical question - for the devs...

[James McKenzie]

James_Huk wrote:
> Hello everybody.
>
> I know this is user forum - but I also know that developers "lurks" in here from time to time. So I would like to ask... what do you (developers) think is the biggest issue in wine development? Is it money? How much would wine development process speed up if Codewavers would start selling... let say, 10 times more licenses for Crossover then they sell now? Would it be a dramatic speed up (by that I mean for example - MS is presenting "DirectX15" in January and we have 90% of it implemented in wine in March or April), or Windos API is so messed up, that even having 1000 programmers wouldn't help that much?
>
>   
More support by CodeWeavers is a good thing.  However, adding 10, 100, 
or 1000 developers might not improve things, and may make matters 
worse.  What we do need is 'clean' coders that are persistant and 
willing to work on a problem until it is properly fixed.  We are loosing 
some good coders because of 'real life' or the fact that their coding 
has to go through a lot of testing and review before it is accepted.  We 
do tend to rely on a core bunch of coders (not all of them work for 
CodeWeavers) to get much of the coding done for this project.

> I'm asking because I'm curious.
>
>   
I'll give you an example.  I've been working with Dylan Smith on one 
minor but important code segment for the riched20.dll file.  I started 
with code created by someone else and have worked through most, but not 
all, of the concerns.  I will continue to work on this until it is 
either finished or I'm not here anymore.  That is called persistence.  
Some folks will pick up a project, work on it for a while and then put 
it back down.  Unfortunately, some of these attempts do not have full 
documentation and thus are very hard to figure out what was done and why 
it was that way.

I'm a big stickler for code documentation, for this very reason.  I work 
on stuff everyday and sometimes I have to revisit fixes made three 
months ago and it takes me most of a day to figure out what I was doing, 
and I document like a fiend.  I feel sorry for those who pick up a chunk 
of code and then have to figure out what was going on, with absolutely 
no documentation.  It's ok to remove it when submitting to Alexandre, 
but when you are working on it, document, document, document.  That way 
if you have to leave the project or someone else picks up your work, 
they don't have to spend days looking up documentation or trying to 
figure out what you were doing...

James McKenzie