Re: Wine developer frustration (was Re: ntdll: Improve stub of NtQueryEaFile.)

[Theodore Dubois]

> First, yes, we do have hacks in CrossOver, but I think 'a lot' is
> unfair. We really try to avoid those hacks, and we work hard to
> eliminate them. For example, I reviewed our tracker that lists our
> hacks. We have about 100 outstanding; in the last 6 months, we removed
> 4 with upstream fixes, and added 1 new one. Further, we have long felt
> that our diff with winehq was tragically large. But nicely, I can now
> compare it to wine-staging, and claim that it is relatively modest
> <grin>. We touch 28K lines in 228 files versus 100K lines in 509 files
> for wine-staging [1].
 
May I suggest you eliminate those hacks by merging them into the Wine codebase?

Right now I have a feeling that Wine is wonderful, but Codeweavers is evil. It seems that this feeling is shared by many non-Codeweavers Wine developers. Codeweavers has done a lot of work on Wine, which I really appreciate, but I wish they would be much more open. I think there should, at least, be a public database listing all the hacks that are in Crossover. That way, I would know what the heck was going on inside those windowless walls.

This may sound unthinkable, but I would also suggest going further and releasing the source code for the hacks. Not the Crossover-only ones like sendwndcmd.exe. Or the ones that can't be released because of NDAs. I mean the ones that would improve the vanilla Wine distribution.

It seems possible to me that you're not releasing these hacks because they would improve vanilla Wine to the point where nobody would be willing to pay for Crossover anymore. If that is true, it's the other reason that I think Codeweavers is evil. I mean, can't you make enough money on consulting for companies that think that Crossover/Codeweavers is better because it costs more money?

If there's no openness about what Crossover is doing to Wine, I just can't trust them to develop it.

~Theodore
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