[Wine] Re: Playonlinux and Office 2007

[oiaohm]

qparis thanks that is what we need.    I would consider the full bug link for users.

Most people don't notice that you can vote on bugs you class as important and need fixing.  Yes its just a guide to developers to help developers decide order of what they work on.   Wine have multi levels of reporting that we need people using.

GNU_Raziel You are following our ideas on patching.   With the little clearer information as what is coming.  We will be able to work closer with each other.

For us the more testers the better reports we have in appdb the better and the better bug reports.  The tricky part is having everyone submitting complete information.

GNU_Raziel some cases when we are debuging applications we use patches not on the appdb reports when testing.   But the patches will be connect to a bug number from most support people around wine.

Most common has been DIB engine patches.   We are not forbidding experimentation with patches.

Key things is we know what the mix is so we can group same with same and we can get feedback both ways if the patch works or if the patch is now a lemon.   As you saw with the DRM patch what appears to be a good patch can turn lemon very fast.

GNU_Raziel basically for progress we need experimental parts at times to get testing.   Even more experimental the development branch.   So I see the restriction to just appdb patches as too strict to cover all cases.

Knowing what was done and the means to drop back to unpatched to work out if the patch is now dud is our requirements.   Really as long as we can determine what is going on we will be tollerent.   And as long as user of POL or Wine is tollerent to us going threw the steps to work out what is going on.

Yes we have ones in the wine camp that are like I have installed X version wine application don't work make it work.   We look at reports and find out the application does not work with X version but a slightly older one does.   Then when they will no step back to the older version they cannot work out why support just ends.   This bad behavior I don't expect POL users to be 100 percent free of.   We have not been able to make wine normal community 100 percent free of.

One of the common annoyances even with wine to a point that I am trying to stamp out in wine.  With wine users you get people saying Wine current version.   Instead of stating wine version in use.   I do see a little bit of the same problem from POL users.   Recent example.   it works in POL but not Wine 1.3.8.  Lot of questions latter you find out that the program inside POL it is  Wine 1.3.4 the last know test of the program working.   This is basically POL being used in the same bad way as current version.

I except we are most likely never going to be 100 percent free of this problem.   Its just something to keep in mind when doing interface design its something that needs to be thought about how applications are displayed if wine version in use could be made more clearly displayed.   Just like us people on the POL side should discourage bad reporting.  POL using wine <number> should be encouraged.  Most likely help with your tracking of problems as well.

Maybe even maintaining a section in both our FAQ telling users how to get wine version in use out of POL.  This is really a last resort I know how badly end users don't read FAQ's these days.

There is imperfection on both sides.  At-least we now have dialog and progress along the right paths.   Hopefully along the way GNU_Raziel you can get more freedom to make stuff work and we end up with better reporting and testing to work with for future versions of wine.

Wine development can only end when Windows is dead and Wine has caught up to it.   Testing and Reporting is going to be a on going thing for a long time to come.

I am more than willing to share what commonly have or see issues with in the #winehq irc on freenode.   Hopefully one day people using open source and reporting correctly would be natural.   Its still very unnatural for lots of open source programs out there.  POL might solve some of the problem for wine.