w9x testbot state?

[Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com]

Hi,

>> what happened to the w9x test bots?  I'd like them to run some kernel32 tests.
>> Testbot says "offline".
>They were hosted at Gé's house. Testbot can no longer reach them.
Ouch.

Dmitry Timoshkov wrote:
> Are there plans to 'revive' them?
>>There is no point in that, it's been discussed many times already.

I believe there's a common misconception here.
- Writing code that passes tests on w9x machines
  is not anymore a prerequisite for submitting/accepting patches.
  Save your time for other work.
- Eliminating some broken(/*w9x*/) from the tests is a good thing
  because removing any instance of broken() is a good thing as
  I've argued several times, because it can hide bugs.
- If you write e.g. d3dx12 or .net, you need not care about w9x.

However, if like me, you spend a lot of time with APIs designed and
used in the nineties, e.g. MCI, then it makes a hell of a lot of sense
to write tests that pass on w9x to discover how the API behaved at the
time where the app was written. 

What was the behavior that the developers observed back then?
What could they have used for testing their app?

I don't care much about how these old APIs behave in w7 when I can
read on the back of some covers "doesn't work in XP, needs w98" or in
forums "must set compatibility mode XYZ to work in XP" but no single
test in Wine tells us what the compatibility modes in XP actually do!

Because of that, I fear that further patches from me to the MCI might
be delayed for lack of validation.
I was quite pleased when the W98SE machine would run the audio tests.

That's why working w9x testbots are a valuable resource.

Maarten, I really hope testbot w9x manages to work once again.

Regards,
 Jörg Höhle