IBM, Notes, Wine and (necessary) version numbers for wine

[rob at mediasolution.it]

Hi there,

> One of the better ways to show the potential to IBM would be to find one 
of 
> their apps that *does* work under WINE and get it demoed to their 
> management. Although it sounds like some of them are already 
(internally) 
> using Notes under Linux? 

Let me use your message to speak about a "feature" of the wine 
developement model that's starting to "annoy" me: using "date-version" 
instead of a proper version number for the snapshot.
I know I'm in no position to get annoyed by anything, since Iìve 
contributed no code or useful hints so far :-), but I'd really like to see 
this change.


We all know Wine is evolving rather fast, and every 'n' months a major 
subsystem gets rewritten to be able to implement it the "right" way, 
windows speaking, or because the old implementation was only partially 
complete. That's not a problem, since this way wine becomes better and 
bettter.

Where the problem is, however, is that I can't know when these changes, 
that usually bring forth major breakages in some/many applications, are 
done. I've been following wine-devel and wine-cvs and, back in June (IIRC) 
when the windows handling code was changed, I wasn't too surprised when 
Lotus Notes stopped working (and it's still broken in many ways, window 
repainting for example).

Too bad SuSE people didn't follow the lists, and going from version 7.2 to 
version 7.3 of their distro, they "upgraded" their wine rpm package from 
20010326 to 20010731. With the new version, notes doesn't start at all...

I ask: isn't it about time to use version numbers, like in the linux 
kernel? I now you are working toward "1.0" release, but I guess some 0.6.x 
(stable) 0.7.x (unstable), 0.8.x (stable again) coudn't hurt, and this 
kind of versioning give hints to people on where to go and what to 
download if they want something stable or if they want the "newest".

I think it's important to let wine users understand if the package they 
are about to install is a stable, well tested version, or an extremely 
new, developemental and untested version.

In my opinion, some snapshot (like the April 2001 one) are definitely beta 
quality, so I think it's useful to let people know this, especially at a 
time like this when the Lindows people are saying "we fixed wine, going 
from alfa to release!"... I'd really like to know from which snapshot they 
started...


Ciao,
  Roberto

P.S.
I hope to be more useful in future, since I'm starting my own business 
that will be based rather heavily on Linux, and this way I hope I'll be 
able to search and destroy the most annoying bugs I find.. :-)