World Wine News

Dear Wine developers,

You may recall that I volunteered to help host WineConf in the Netherlands in 2007 when, after a vote, an offer by Dan Kegel to host at Google's offices in Zurich won the bid.

Last year WineConf went across the pond to Minnesota, so it seems natural that this year's WineConf will be hosted in the country with the highest number of Wine developers per capita ;-)

At Twente University Campus to be precise, near the city of Enschede: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=104770595427636833911.00044a70a58a75a8aaa2e&ll=52.240573,6.852207&spn=0.0226,0.057764&z=15

From November 6-8 (Friday to Sunday).

I chose this place because of its good facilities and relatively low costs; we want to make the conference accessible for as many developers as possible.

Directions, agenda, etc. will be made available on this page:

http://wiki.winehq.org/WineConf

Please e-mail me at wineconf at meelstraat.net if you intend to come, so we can make a better estimation of the number of attendees.

See you there!

-Hans

A:
Our firm (Law office KINDL & PARTNERS) is basically a branch of law office situated in Prague. Our seat is city Chomutov, Czech republic (GPS: 50°27'34"N, 13°24'44.637"E). All my answers are pertinent only to this Chomutov branch as I have no control over Prague HQ :-)

A:
We have 4 desktops in office and our employees use their notebooks for working from home (either their own or lent from company), there's about 7 of them. We have 2 servers - one housed in Prague and one inhouse.

A:
For both desktops and notebooks we use Mandriva (2009 with KDE3) and our servers use Gentoo.

A:
We've been running Linux on these computers for almost 2 years (I should mention that this Chomutov branch is open for almost 2 years and we've been running Linux there ever since). I myself use Linux since approx. '97 (Slackware 3.4 or 3.5) and have been increasingly running it since that time (dual booting first, single booting now...).

A:
Well as any law office we basically need few programs. We use OpenOffice.org exclusively for usual office work. XSane for scanning documents (have network ADF scanner - it was real pain to find one...), KPDf for viewing them and basically that's it. Our branch is running a heavily modified version of Mantis bugtracker as its internal IS.

A:
We run ASPI (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=3194), which stands as an acronym to 'Automated system of legal/law information'. It's basically source of currently valid Czech laws and EU regulations and accompanying literature and court decisions (European Court of Justice/Court of the First Instance). No other Win apps are needed.

A:
Aside from teaching our employees, that most applications have same functionality but different name and that they don't have to update anti-virus every morning any more, no. Sometimes, very occasionaly, (twice a year approx.) fonts in ASPI go crazy (they're substituted with hard to read Goth-like script). Purging wine directory and fresh install solves it though :-) .

thank you for good work T. Kindl

* The strategy we use - the order we tackle various bugs - really does matter. Every strategy gets to the perfect 100% end after solving all the bugs, but some get you ten times as many happy users when you're only half done. In practice, having far more users likely translates into extra developers and a much faster rate of development.

* Varying the difficulty of individual bugs didn't matter much. The pictures came out pretty much the same

* Prioritizing the last few bugs in apps that are almost done is one of the most productive ways to increase happy users - in the simulations I ran it even outperformed working on the most popular application. Unfortunately in the real world it can sometimes be difficult to tell if an application "almost works" in Wine.

* Similarly, "almost happy users" are the easiest to satisfy. When we have many to choose from, picking one arbitrarily and ensuring he was happy before moving on to the next user significantly outperformed trying to satisfy almost happy users at random.

* Instances of "collateral damage" - the fixing of one application causing another application to start working without any extra effort - are rather uncommon until most applications are almost working. The wintrust API is needed by both Steam and iTunes, however when enough of wintrust was implemented to make Steam work there were still many unrelated bugs causing iTunes to remain broken.

* Just about every reasonable way of generating bug difficulty, relative bug probability, applications, and users that I could think of lead to the same general picture: something that looks roughly linear for most of it before taking a very sharp upward turn near the very end. In other words, the model tells us that we should expect to be pleasantly surprised. At some point, Wine will get very good very fast.

I was working on an very old Bug and learned Perl just to fix it! It was Bug Number 61, the second oldest Bug not yet fixed. Reported on 2000-10-25 by Francois Gouget.

It was about enhancing 'winemaker' to read out project-files from Visual Studio and i found it 2009-01-25 thinking "wow, such old bugs?". After weeks of work and much rejected patches it finally got in. And it supports .dsw, .vcproj and .sln files beside the .dsp file. So its ready for newer Visual Studio versions also.

Francois Gouget was a good mentor for that time.

Hi,

The Wine tests are now passing on a Windows XP machine (http://test.winehq.org/data/4b27dfec939d131c9d7e09f97f14dfc7dabe8843/#group_XP). Two of the other four only have 2 or 3 failures.

The 2003 group has 3 machines with 1 failure each (urlmon:protocol on one, user32:menu on the others).

Congratulations to everyone involved fixing the tests!

- Reece