Wrap-up of wineconf

[Marcus Meissner]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 09:29:56AM +0000, Hugh McMaster wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Are there any summaries or presentations from Wineconf available for those of us who couldn't attend? (And even those who could...)

I took some brief notes (mostly as report for SUSE), hoping for videos to be avaible ;)

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Hi,

I have attended the 2018 wineconf, at the event of 25 years of Wine.

(I have been participating in the project since 1995, so for 23 of those years ;)

Location: Den Haag, the Netherlands. 

Circa 40 people were present, several newcomers and a small number of external
wine users. Codeweavers shipped over most of this staff, which would usually
not come (guessing around + 7 people of QA, support and bizdev).
This made it the largest Wineconf (so far).

Saturday:

1. Introduction Keynote by Alexandre Julliard

   (He is usually not going into long talks ;)
   - Overall LOC is growing.
   - git commit rate is fluctuating, it was higher some years ago, dropped
     but has been recovering a bit.
   - A retrospective of the first 2 wine years with anecdotes.
     Imagine a world without websites, remote source management systems,
     patches by email, delivery by tarballs uploaded to ftp and no
     seperate email lists (wine was using LKML the first 2 years).

2. Codeweavers update by Jeremy White

   (Codeweavers employs around 50% of the Wine Developers including the
    lead, and is the main sponsor of the project.)
   Very short. They currently are having good years, building up staff.
   Business consists of mostly:
   - the Crossover product (a enhanced Wine + UI + support etc)
   - Porting efforts (wine based) (consulting for others)


3. Introductionary round

   Everyone standing up, name and one sentence what he is doing at Wine.

4. Wine Staging by Zebediah Figura

   (Backstory: Wine Staging is a patchset on top of Wine, consisting
    largely of patches that are not yet polished up enough for Wine.
    Originally a bit of a fork, but retargeted to be a staging area
    in the traditional sense.
    Operated first by 2 students, but as they finished their studies
    the lost interest, now picked up by 2 other developers.)

   An introduction to wine staging first, then some numbers game.
   Over 300 patchsets of total 1000 patches, slowly merged over to
   wine. The statistics graph showed an initial dip, but currently
   the incoming/outgoing rate is the same, so the numbers are staying
   level.

   We discussed a bit on better pickup of patches for staging (e.g.
   getting the ones falling of the wine review queue)

   In the end they need more help to get patches in.

5. The Electronic Design Automation Market - Jeff Hanson

   A real world talk ... Engineer that designs PCBs,
   talked a lot about the background and development and
   the Software Ecosystem of PCB design, with it lots
   of legacy software with various plugins.
   Not very Wine focused, but some Wine experience reported.

   Some Wine developers also have Electronic Design background
   and have also occasionaly fixed applications of that space.

6. An Update on ARM Emulation - Stefan Dösinger and André Hentschel 

   Ongoing topic from last year.

   Running x86 binaries on ARM, with QEMU emulation wedged not at the lowest
   level, but at API level, converting API calls directly to ARM native
   at the API level, or emulating x86 built standard dlls.

   Additional interesting is running 32bit x86 binaries on 64bit x86
   this year, using the same/similar methods. 

   Required to be addressed as MacOS will stop supplying 32bit runtime
   environment and remove even 32bit compat mode from their kernel in 2019.

   (they have not contact qemu development)

   Worms (x86) on NVIDIA Shield was shown.
   Notepad++, Age of Empires (?) was shown on an Android Phone.

Saturdays social event was a Wine 25 year BBQ in the backyard of a store
of the organizers sister.

Sunday 1.7.2018

1. Keynote by Bradley Kuhn

   He talked about what the Software Freedom Conservancy does for Wine,
   which is managing our finances, but also taking off the legal risks
   of individual developers as they pose as an umbrella organisation.

2. Wine Vulkan Architecture - Roderick Colenbrander 

   The new graphics framework and how it fits into Wine.
   It is tricky on what is handled in Wine, what is forwarded to native
   Linux. Stuff already works (and enabled in SUSE WINE).

3. Winetest infrastructure discussion - Jeremy White 

   Jeremys usual try of getting a test reduction session running failed...
   The attendance is just too big for a single hackathon.

4. Introduction to Wine Direct3D architecture - Henri Verbeet 

   Very good introduction what WINE d3d components are, and how they
   interconnect and connect back to Linux OpenGL or Vulkan.

5. CCP´s experience with Wine for EVE Online - Snorri Sturluson 

   EVE Online is MMORPG Space simulation, existing now for quite a
   while. They spent some effort on adding Wine support and have
   their own Wine fork for this.
   Mostly also anecdotes and stories, also future looking on
   what 3D graphics framework to move to.

6. Packaging

   Roseanne di Mesio complains that the current official packagers
   of Fedora, Mageia, Debian and Ubuntu are not responsive enough, 
   especially when adding new distro versions.

   Strong need to pull this to a bigger audience, perfect for OBS
   actually.

   Marcus and also 2 Debian knowledgable packagers agreed to help
   with packaging and OBS.

7. Website/GDPR

   Briefly touched, will contact back SF Conservancy.
   Privacy contact published on webpage.,

8. SWAG by Aric Stewart

   Not much feedback on SWAG sine launch last year.
   No one requested stickers.

   So we are still not that sure what to offer. Stickers seemed
   a lowcost/effort thing.
   (I handed out 100 at FOSDEM, if you ever saw a Wine sticker tell Marcus ;)

9. Poll on newcomers why they came by

   No clear picture. Most of them paid by Codeweavers,
   the Debian packager for packaging.

A. Next Wineconf

   Mid of year was well received, the weather was pleasant in Den Haag.

   There were some ideas:
   - Kiev, Ukraine externally suggested
   - Vilnius
   - Toronto, Kanada
   - Austin, Texas, US
   - Stuttgart, Germany
   - (they tried to volunteer me for Nuernbeg too)

   Nothing set in stone, defered to mailinglist.

B. Wine 0.5 challenge

   There was also a call for a Wine 0.5 challenge, get wine 0.5
   running with Solitaer on current Linux, which got largely dropped.

   I spent some hours on it, and it starts executing 16 bit SOL.EXE,
   but crashes before it starts showing stuff.
   Fun on what code the compiler no longer likes. ;)