Celebrating some hard work

[Jeremy White]

Hi folks,

You may have noticed Rob submitting a long string of OLE
patches.

That is formally the last set of 'hard work' we planned to
do as part of our work on our 5.0 release.  Now we just
have to do the 'easy part' - stabilizing for release <g>.

The big picture items included the window manager rewrite,
the OLE/COM work, and the work on MSI.

I'd like to take a minute to thank all the people, both
inside and outside CodeWeavers, that helped to work on
these projects.

I think that these tasks represent a fairly signficant
milestone for Wine - we seem to have enough working that
Alexandre is willing to contemplate a non alpha release;
that's a pretty big deal.  (Another 11 years, and maybe 1.0
will actually happen :-/).

At any rate, this work has been a bit hard on us, because
it's largely been under the hood, unsexy work that tends
to cause regressions.  So from a customer perspective, the
rational analysis is:  "you did all that work and now my
windows don't scroll right?  Morons!"

But one of the key benefits that the OLE/MSI work gives
us, in particular, is that we can now intelligently
debug issues with COM, which was always a nightmare
to debug before.

And, as you all probably know, many installers rely heavily
on both COM and MSI to do their work.

So we now believe that many, many more installers will
'just work' than before.  And we further believe that those
that don't work can be fixed in a much more straightforward
way.

Thus, I am now making good on my promise to
lock Rob and Aric in a room and make installers go.
We've announced a formal, CrossOver based program over
on our web site.  However, I wanted to let you know that
we'll do the same on an informal basis, particularly
for known Wine developers.

I'm hoping that as a result of this work we'll soon be able
to claim with a straight face:  "Most things install."

So, if you have an app that doesn't install, post a message
to wine-devel, and let's see if we can't make some lemonade
and have a party!

Cheers,

Jeremy