My GSoC 2012 proposal

[Austin English]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 00:22, Lucas Zawacki <lfzawacki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> First of all, I'll introduce myself: I'm Lucas Fialho Zawacki a
> Computer Science undergrad at UFRGS
> university in Brazil. I have worked with Wine in GSoC 2011
> (http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/lfzawacki/8001)
> and pretty much enjoyed the experience.
>
> I'd like to work again with Wine for this year's GSoC and with this
> email discuss some possible projects.
>
> *Joystick Configuration Tool*
>
> This seems like a natural project for me to work since I'm very
> familiar with DirectInput and have access to some josysticks,
> including force feedback. I'm not sure about what "Support system
> joystick calibration" is though. Is it related to bug 24235 ?
>
> *Scons Wine*
>
> I think this could turn out to be very worthwhile project, but there's
> little documentation about it. To make Scons aware of Winelib would it
> be enough to create an environment that uses the winelib compilers,
> libs and includes? Then it would be a question of programatically
> generating the build script, much like winemaker does for the
> makefile.
>
> I've also been looking at Winemaker and trying to convert some visual
> studio projects from random google code repositories with moderate
> success. As a part of this project I could test it with numerous
> samples, e.g Nehe tutorials (http://nehe.gamedev.net/), and with
> assorted open source projects targeting windows, and make these just
> work with Winemaker.
>
> *Winetricks*
>
> Other ideas fall in winetricks territory so I don't know if they
> constitute a valid Wine GSoC project, but they're:
>
> * Regression Testing GUI. Help a user download the repository, compile
> wine and run assisted or automated bisections.

IMHO, this effort is better spent elsewhere. It's a cool idea, but
GUI's are notoriously difficult to automate in testing. To make it
worse, you have to wait for the application to install/test, which is
a large time/space investment. It's also unreliable. The time is
better spent boiling down failures into isolated testcases and getting
those testcases into Wine's, where they are tested daily, on a broad
range of systems, with thousands of tests in under 10 minutes.

> * Compatibility and exchange of installation recipes with other
> frontends like PlayOnLinux
> * Winetricks and AppDB integration. A way to mirror in AppDB the
> dependencies and workarounds employed by winetricks recipes.

Winetricks is not a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code.
That said, it theoretically could be under Wine's umbrella (as I did
with Appinstall, which did gui testing in 2009), but I think most
would rather see work done on Wine directly.

-- 
-Austin