Wine-1.0 release notes

[Reece Dunn]

2008/6/11 Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel at kievinfo.com>:
> In short - that after everyone's hard work and 15 years of development
> wine-1.0 is just a release tag nothing more.

I think that this is overly harsh. It's like saying that you should
not celebrate a birthday, as that is just you aging just a day,
nothing more.

Wine is in a strange position as it is trying to make any Windows
application (ultimately) run on any suitable posix system with a
suitable X server. Given that a new version of Windows is usually
released every 2-3 years, with new features, APIs and functionality,
the landscape is constantly changing. Couple this with each successive
release of an application supporting newer technologies and APIs - the
set of which differs from application to application, makes it harder
to support.

Yes, regressions will happen. Yes, applications will crash/fail to
work. But think of all the applications that *do* work; given what
Wine is working against, this is an amasing achievement. Wine can and
does run Office, Photoshop, ITunes, Oblivion, Peggle and a myriad
other applications (some better than others).

So yes, highlight the known issues in the release notes, list the
major applications (with corresponding version numbers) that are known
to work and refer the user to the AppDB for more information. However,
don't sell it short either.

I am personally using Wine to run the Cepstral SwiftTalker
text-to-speech program, play Oberon/PopCap/casual games like Peggle,
Bejeweled 2 and Bloom on my Ubuntu laptop. I'm sure that other people
have other success stories as well, such as Susan Cragin, who uses
Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.

Maybe what we need is a "What I use Wine for" set of documents or
mini-articles where people describe what Windows applications they are
running, what works/does not work for them. Dan's Spouse test is also
a good idea. Perhaps we can get some feedback on the Spouses
experiences of using the applications under Wine.

NOTE: I have been testing various casual games from Oberon with the
various RC releases and have found that over 50% of those tested
(around 14 at the moment) worked out of the box when ran directly from
their install directory. While this does not seem a lot, given what
Wine is developing against, I think this is a huge success.

NOTE: I am not saying Wine is perfect, I'm saying that the message
should be positive and realistic instead of unduly negative.

- Reece