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

[Jeremy White]

Hi Theodore,

On 06/16/2015 02:51 PM, Theodore Dubois wrote:
> 
>> 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?

Um, I'm afraid you are really not understanding what is happening here.
 I just pointed out how hard we work to eliminate these hacks.  They
can't simply be merged; Alexandre will refuse them, that's the point.
To eliminate a hack is often months and months of very hard work to
implement something 'right'.

And the figure I quoted pointed out that we had merged proper fixes,
eliminating 4 hacks, in the past six months.  So that's probably a man
years worth of work in improving Wine that we just finished.


> 
> 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.

I'm obviously very sad that you perceive us as evil.  Do you mind me
asking where you got that feeling from?  If there is an information
source that is revealing all of our evil secrets, I'd like to know about
it. <grin>

> 
> 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.
> 

All of our Wine code, including our hacks, is publicly released, here:
  https://www.codeweavers.com/products/faq/source/

> 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?

I'm afraid that a lot of folks have a lot of misconceptions about how
much money we make.  I wish we had as much as you apparently think we
have.  The Wine/CrossOver business is not a hugely profitable one.
There are far more effective ways that I, and my coworkers, could be
making money than what we do.  And we do not make money by harming Wine;
that holds no appeal for any of us.  We try to make money by providing a
stable and supported version of Wine.  If we're also able to
substantially improve Wine, which we often are, we consider that a
delightful bonus.

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

Um, nearly all of the work that we do on CrossOver is done by sending
public emails to this mailing list.  How is that not open?  Or perhaps I
should ask - what gave you the impression that we did not develop openly?

Cheers,

Jeremy