wintab32 (from CrossOver Office)

[Robert North]

Jeremy White jwhite-at-codeweavers.com |Wine Mailing Lists| wrote:
> No, our policy is not to be particularly secretive; we
> particularly don't want to waste anyones time, ever.
> There is so much to do that any inefficiency is 
> anathema to us.
> 
> We just goofed.
> 
> In fact, Alexandre often goes out of his way to spot
> cases where someone is working on something we're
> also working on, and tries to make sure that there
> is no wasted effort.  You can use the NPTL work
> as one example, and there were also some critical 
> Photoshop install bugs that were fixed in WineHQ
> because Alexandre noticed someone needed them.
> 
> Also, we did discuss Rob's work before
> Aric started on Wintab.  We noted he'd said he was working
> on it, but we hadn't seen any patches or heard
> anything further (afair, his last email was November), 
> so we assumed he hadn't had time.

There were later e-mails, but they weren't explicitly
to do with wintab.
Then again, I've found it extremely difficult to search the archives for
  references to anything, so maybe not a big deal really.

> 
> The rude thing we did was failed to send an email
> to Rob with a heads up/gut check with him on the
> status.  If it helps, Aric feels terrible about it.

Yes, you should have done so.
I was involved with a whole bunch of stuff, and so
didn't have much time to give to the wintab project.
The progress I was making wasn't significant enough to
mail to the list till recently.


> 
> Now, I will say, we do like to hold our development
> tree separate while we're working on it.  This is in
> part just so we can stabilize around a release, but
> it's also in part so we can get a big 'publicity'
> splash around new features.


I am not involved with this project on a commercial basis.
But if I was, then it's likely that I'd follow a similar procedure
to yours. This would mean little communication, somtimes highly
circumspect till a public milestone was reached.

I think the rule should be that if someone says they're working on
something then anyone who wants to work on the same area should contact 
them.
This is a rule everyone should keep in mind, not just Codeweaver
employees.

> 
> I know that Chris poked at the system tray support,
> but didn't get very far, and we pulled him
> to attacking other things in the hopes that Mike Hearn
> would get the XEMBED support done...
> 
> Candidly, we often see other peoples work and think
> 'ooooh, I hope we can get that into CrossOver X.X',
> but we feel that it would be rude to tell you to
> hurry up and get XEMBED done so we can ship 2.1 <grin>.
> 
> I do have to admit that I think we've done a pretty
> poor job of interacting with wine-devel, sometimes.
> We just had a big discussion on IRC about it.
> 
> We're reluctant to do our development 'in the open'
> (i.e. submit our patches as we work on them).  
> 
> I should be clear - the developers are cheerful
> to do that, but Management is not comfortable.
> We really do live and die by our CrossOver Sales;
> we're just barely making enough money to keep doing
> what we're doing (and some months, not even that), 
> and we worry that if WineHQ starts having all of our 
> 'good stuff' before we can make a splash with it, it 
> will harm us.  It nearly happened to us just now; ELX Linux
> announced Photoshop 7 support before cxoffice 2.0
> (luckily they didn't get much press).

Maybe you should consider approaching developers who
are working on things close to you commercial interests,
and see if you can work together for mutual benefit.

> 
> Also, we're really not all that secretive.  We've
> been telling pretty much anyone who wants to know
> that we were working on Photoshop, Access, and
> Office XP.  Next is the Macromedia stuff...
> We're small, so we do change direction when a paying 
> customer waves money at us, but we try to be pretty open.  
> Just ask <grin>
> 
> We're debating now how to do better.  And we're
> open to suggestions.  Ideas?

None really, I think I covered this earlier in the mail.


Well thanks for explaining the situation.

Now back to thinking about how to integrate what I've done
with Aric's code.

Bye
	-Rob.