[Wine]Crossover and Free/Wine

[Mark Knecht]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 13:06:41 -0500, James Hawkins <truiken at gmail.com> wrote:
> > it really appears to me that there isn't a consistent -APPLICATION- based
> > test procedure happening with the standard version of Wine before each
> > monthly release.
> 
> As the open-source model of development goes, it's really up to the
> people that use the application to maintain it.  That includes the
> developers from crossover, and anyone that uses wine.  There are just
> too many applications, and subsequently too many features in those
> apps, to test before every major wine release.  We do have a
> conformance testing system in place for the api though:
> 
> http://winehq.org/site/docs/wine-devel/testing
> 
> The problem is that we don't have enough tests, and we need more help
> writing new tests.  The other problem is that it's very difficult to
> test everything about wine that could break an app, say for example
> whether a button is the right color or not.  We can't really test that
> with automated tests.
> 

This is consistent with my understanding and (I think) with what I
wrote earlier. However, that seems to imply that the only users are
people who are programmers and can maintain it. I don't think that's
necessarily a valid assumption as the user base and supported
application base grows.

My thought, good or bad I don't know, is to do something *user* based
which tests real apps. This would then start to duplicate a bit of
what Codeweavers is doing with their application database, but would
do it for each monthly release.

For instance, there are some apps I depend on Crossover for - M$
Office and Quicken - that I would be willing to 'reinstall' in a
second user account monthly to test for the community. If other users
operated purely as users and did the same for other apps then this
would be good information, or so I think.

There are other apps that I want to run, and can run, with newer
versions of Wine. They include some that work, like Native Instruments
Battery, and many that don't, like Native Instruments Reaktor,
Steinberg's Groove Agent, Tascam's GigaStudio, etc. I'd be absolutely
incentivized to to try installing these once a month if some progress
was being made to get them to work. This is where the users, somehow,
have to get linked up, directly or indirectly, with the developers.
(I'd probably prefer indirectly, but that's my bias...)

My real thought right now is to forget the developers for a little
while and just start up a web-based database that lists how well
things work right now. 4-5 users, like me, trying out a few things and
displaying results in a new way. If it helps it helps. If it doesn't
it's no great loss, and not an issue for the developers since they
aren't involved if they don't want to be.

- Mark