DIB clarification

Michael Stefaniuc mstefani at redhat.com
Mon Aug 30 05:43:50 CDT 2010


Jeff Cook wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Jeremy White <jwhite at codeweavers.com> wrote:
>>> This could also help.  If I recall correctly, Jeremy White mentioned
>>> at Wineconf 2008 that this was a major reason they haven't invested
>>> serious energy into one themselves:  they had a hard time finding an
>>> application that they cared about that benefited significantly from a
>>> DIB engine.  Usually, bottlenecks were elsewhere.  Whether they didn't
>>> care about AutoCAD, or whether they hadn't tested with it, or whether
>>> my memory is just faulty, I'm not sure.
>> Yes, that's essentially right, although note that we did invest some
>> fairly serious energy into the DIB engine prior to coming to that conclusion.
>> (I remember how pleased Huw was that his benchmarks were 1000 times
>> faster, and how displeased he was when it made Powerpoint slower...)
>>
>> That effort all went into Wine, and I hope and believe that it has
>> helped others as they have worked on the DIB engine.
>>
>> But we don't have any secret stash of DIB engine code to further our
>> evil plans for world domination.  We rely on our gorgeous femme bots
>> and Alexandre's magic 'all' patch for that <grin>.
>>
 > To clarify, it's not about having secret DIB engine code, it's about
> saying "I guess we just won't find time to provide useful feedback
> until some company sponsors it...", as I saw several times during the
> old threads.
This is a misunderstanding. Codeweavers figured out that they do not
*need* the DIB engine aka it isn't the bottleneck. The estimates to get
it implemented/merged where 6-12 man month of "architect level" Wine
developer time. A huge time investment for little gain and thus
Codeweavers decided to invest their resources in other areas that have a
higher return of investment.

Now people keep asking about the DIB engine and how to motivate
Codeweavers to work on that. I replied to that that in my *personal*
opinion they won't do that unsexy and costly work unless somebody is
waiving at them with some serious amount of money. That's the standard
way in the enterprise world of rising the priority of a bug. But this is
my *personal* opinion; I never ever have seen a Codeweavers employee say
something like that. And I know Jeremy, he would *love* to get a DIB
engine for free, especially as he knows its value in $$$ ;)

Now that "that waive with $$$" isn't very likely as the cost/benefit
ratio isn't very good. More likely is that Codeweavers will start
working on a Quartz driver and that work will make the DIB engine
"cheaper" to implement. Again, this is my *personal* opinion.

bye
	michael





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