Directx9

[Mike Hearn]

> I think that reasoning distracts from the real issue:
> creating a stable and an unstable branch incurs an administrative overhead,
> one which might simply be too much compared to the gain we'd have without that
> overhead because we could concentrate on other things (things which are
> still not implemented, such as a very large percentage of Win32 APIs).

I think people are overestimating the burden. The stable branch doesn't 
have to exist for long, it could even be for just a few weeks before a 
release so people can do testing, hunt down regressions and so on.

> Linux (and all the other projects mentioned above) doesn't have such issues
> at all, since it sets its own pace (and thus has a well-defined current
> set of capabilities that are ALL implemented at any point in time),
> so it's well-justified to have stable/unstable there.

I don't think it's about features. It's more about buggyness, and having 
popular apps work. Having a stabilisation period where only regression 
fixes are allowed on a particular branch could help with that.

> After all I don't think our Wine CVS is THAT broken/problematic (the
> test suite should help here, too! Why not improve that one for a change?),
> and if people want that extra bit of stability, then they're very
> well-advised to go with CXO (or do you want to deprive CodeWeavers
> of their well-earned money? ;-)).

Hehe, of course not :) I'm not volunteering to do any of this, at least 
not right now! If Jeremy wanted to push Wine 0.9/1.0 forward then yes 
I'd be happy to work on it but right now I don't have the time, and what 
time I do have all goes on bugfixes and stabilisation for CrossOver.

Anyway. The fact that CrossOver is a successful product perhaps says 
something about the value of stable releases.

> Even just thinking of the extra 700MB compiled code on my HDD resulting from
> two branches worries me a bit. ;-)

Nobody is saying you have to use it, I'm sure most kernel developers 
don't have both 2.4 and 2.6 installed at once.

> Not to mention that I believe that the kernel and KDE projects have a
> drastically larger developer audience than Wine, so they can easily afford
> having some people do the branch maintenance.

No, it's just a matter of willpower. Even small projects can do 
stable/unstable releases. Indeed, KDE basically is just a collection of 
smaller projects.

> So at this point in time I still think that doing stable/unstable branching
> would be the entirely wrong thing to do.

What point in time would it be the right thing to do?

For me, the right time is "whenever Jeremy says it is" :) But, with my 
community hat on, it's something that should be addressed at some point.