[Wine] Installing The Witcher, GOG edition

[Martin Gregorie]

On Wed, 2013-12-18 at 12:03 +0100, Hartmut Figge wrote:

> Looking at the newsgroup, using gmane, it seems quite dead. Have all
> moved to the forum? If so, why?
> 
The mailing list used to be connected to the forum so that forum traffic
was sent to the mailing list and vice versa. While the mailing list was
a spam-free as mailing lists usually are, the forum was extremely lax. 

For some reason I don't understand, but probably commercial since
Crossover ran/runs the forum, they were unwilling to to do anything more
than use human volunteer moderators to block forum spam and were totally
unwilling and/or unable to fit a spam filter between the forum and the
mailing list. Since all the spam complaints seemed to come from mailing
list subscribers, Crossover eventually 'solved' the spam problem by
removing the crosslink between the forum and the mailing list.

FWIW, at least 90% of the spam I received came via the Wine forum, so it
was a significant problem.

Since the split I've gotten rather disillusioned with Wine and use it as
little as possible. The reason? So-called regressions. If the Wine
project ran adequate regression tests I'd use it rather more, but they
apparently don't, since I've never heard a regression test suit
mentioned. In summary, Wine is the least stable piece of published
software I've ever used. IMHO this shows a rather unprofessional
attitude. 

What they should do to fix things is:
- provide a fully automated regression suite 
- make the regression test suite available to developers and 
  mandate its use
- require submission of new features, i.e. support for new M$ APIs, to
  include comprehensive tests for inclusion in the regression test
  suite.
- refuse to accept new code or patches that break existing code.
- never release a Wine version that doesn't pass regression testing

Martin