WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9 179
IamTheRealMike writes "As WineConf 2005 took place last weekend, the Wine developers discussed the project's direction and future. A new deadline of September 30th for the 0.9 release was set by Alexandre Julliard -- the release promises to bring an end to the system of monthly snapshots and provide a new focus on ease of use and stability. A new GPLd application regression testing tool called CXTest was demoed, as was some of the great Direct3D work being done lately. Finally the CEO of Gupta gave a talk. Gupta have ported their 4GL RAD tools to Linux by working with Codeweavers (who sponsored the event), and their experiences were documented in a fascinating presentation. Overall: big thumbs up, but it's not obvious enough that there's enterprise-level support available for Wine. Check out the group photo and the new Wiki!"
Deadlines (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Deadlines (Score:1, Redundant)
I could be out of line... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:4, Insightful)
The critical difference is who sets the deadline. A bunch of developers saying "we want to have it done by dd/mm/yy" may be good motivation. A manager or salesman coming in and saying "it will be done by now()" is not - most of us have probably had to deal with people like that at some point. It's not good.
The deadlines we set ourselves are hopefully sensible ones.
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:1)
Well from a project standpoint, it's a motivational tool to have everything in order within a resonable time. Just because its a community effort does not mean there shouldn't be deadlines.
With a deadline, developers can hurry up and finish their contributions so that the organizer can assess where they are at and set new goals. Deadlines are not just fiscal.
Imagine hiring a contractor to build your house. Wouldn't you set a deadline? Without one how can you plan on the next phase of
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:2)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:2)
" And 0.9 is "stable?" I thought 1.0 was the stable release..."
There's a difference between 'stable' and 'feature-complete'.
If the working parts of an app are solid, but the app as a whole is not feature-complete, then it makes sense to keep it in beta (i.e. sub-1.0). But there's no harm in making it clear to people that the parts that do work aren't likely to break in unforeseen ways.
Does that make it any clearer?
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:2)
Because that's when testing can start. While software starts with development, it's testing that finishes it off with that shiny look :)
A little bit off-topic: every developer should really check out Brian Marick's website [testing.com]. This developer has a firm focus on testing and offers lots of hands-on tips.
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not deadlines that are toxic to commercial endeavors -- it's deadlines * promises, driven by the imperative to capture customer before the competition does. If you promise more than your competitors, but too far in the future, then you have no competitive advantage. If you promise too much less than your competitors, but sooner, then you have no competitive advantage.
The ideal is to have much more than your competition, much sooner. The only way to do that is to be more productive than average.
Since mathematically everyone can't be above average, the typical experience is that you end up with an unfinished pile of shit when your deadline rolls up. Deleting some of the pile simply leaves you with a smaller pile of shit. So the only solution is to let the deadlines slip.
That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines (Score:2)
It's feature deadlines that lead to bad software: sales-oriented people telling the public that the next version will have some whoop-bang feature, and it'll be ready in two month's time (which happens to perfectly coincide with the christmas shopping spree).
A number of Free Software/Open Source projects recently have had success with a different approach, which is to set a Release Deadline. The difference is that, with a release deadline, only features which are ready by the freeze date make it in. Oth
Re:That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines (Score:2)
Re:That's Feature Deadlines, not Release Deadlines (Score:2)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:2)
Re:I could be out of line... (Score:2)
2. Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to post coherently to
Thanks to CodeWeavers (Score:5, Informative)
Kudos to them!
CodeWeavers is awesome- (Score:2)
For $40 you can easily deal with MS office documents and other legacy issues. I have used it for years and I have been quite happy. Well worth the money!
Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers (Score:2, Informative)
One of the issues that could have been a showstopper is that people want to continue (at least for now) using MS Office. Thanks to CodeWeavers, it's not a problem.
Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically, what I was wondering was what the arguments were to push for Linux where you are. I'm sure Linux would do wonders with our aging hardware here and possibly save the place s
Re:Thanks to CodeWeavers (Score:2)
Your questions:
1) Fortunately, there's not much of a bureaucracy. We're a single library that's actually its own taxing district, so really I only had to convince a couple of people to give it a try.
2) Debian. First Woody with a bunch of backports, upgraded to Sarge not long ago. I'm hoping that Sarge will be stable for a good long time. I'll most likely end up using backports for things
Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:1, Insightful)
Just curious if something like this would be possible, i.e. to have a plugin to VisualStudio.NET that will notify at the time of writing the code whether a certain function exists inside the Wine compatibility layer. The thought behind this would be to get into developers' heads the idea that either not being lazy or rather putting in a bit more effort at the time of writing the code would ensure compatibility down the line and open up more avenues of possibility for their application.
You phrase that i
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:3, Insightful)
A tool that would allow me to specify a list of systems I want to be compatible with and then warns about things that wouldn't work on some of them would actually be very handy.
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:1, Insightful)
If you're writing with a non-complete, fairly incompatible approximation of a platform in mind, then you're a fool. You can draw as many flawed analogies about POSIX C libraries as you like - it just isn't sane thinking when you could target a cross-platform toolkit like wxWidgets.
Wine is extremely useful for running applications which never had non-Windows systems in mind. That's what
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:1, Informative)
* It hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.
* Things are constantly changed around and tweaked. What's the point in writing something which may well become broken in the next release?
* Again, there are better methods to write cross-platform applications - libraries and tools actually DESIGNED for this purpose.
* You're limiting yourself to what Wine actually does implement. If you can only use half the features of the intended target, why bother using it at all
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:2)
Or you could switch to wxWidgets.
Re:Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit? (Score:2)
You know... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, OK! I won't give up my day job! Oh wait, I don't have a day job.
I going to go and cry now. Manly tears.
Women (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Women (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Women (Score:1)
Go nuts! (Score:3, Funny)
Go nuts!
Re:Go nuts! (Score:2)
Re:Women (Score:2)
Re:Women (Score:2)
Re:Women (Score:2)
Group Photo (Score:4, Funny)
It's a joke! Sorry, I couldn't come up with anything else.
Geeks and testosterone (Score:2)
Re:Geeks and testosterone (Score:2)
wine bugs havent seen enough work (Score:4, Insightful)
My only true complaint with Wine is how 2/3 of the apps that do work give weird errors and require a lot of tweaking before they actually execute correctly. Its not that I seriously mind messing with the wine config files or spending the time to do so, but it would just be a whole lot easier if it worked by default. Some of the smaller bugs I've found havent been solved over the course of the last year, and I can only hope this new system of deadlines encourages more rapid development to fix the little things those before any new work is done in other areas like directx or 3d support
Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work (Score:2)
I do. Want to tell us what to do to get Microsoft Word to run? Or where to find out?
Re:wine bugs havent seen enough work (Score:2)
The idea is to focus Wine on the "just work" angle. We've had TONS of improvement already. Wine now autogenerates a basic configuration when first run. We got rid of the config file. We added a GUI configuration tool (readonly at this stage). We made drive mapping immediately clear to anyone who bothers to look.
We still have a little more to go. That's why Alexandre allowed himself to bring up a deadline for 0.9. We need the configuration tool
Nerds (Score:4, Funny)
Wine 1.0 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wine 1.0 (Score:3, Informative)
That will never happen. Even Microsoft can't get *all* Win32 programs to work on newer versions of Windows. Some of them depend on low-level hardware access, specific Win9x kernel data structures, etc.
The best I'd hope for is that any *sane* Win32 program will run on Wine. Meaning any program that sticks to the Win32 API (and maybe even programs using undocumented functions, but not the ones using crazy hac
Perhaps... (Score:2)
There are too many incompatible versions of WINE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN (Score:2)
So why use Windows tools any more?
This is not a troll, I use Linux and Free software to make music myself, for example Audacity [sourceforge.net], Ecasound [eca.cx] and Soundtracker [soundtracker.org] . These are definitely not the most advanced examples, but they suffice for me for now.
Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN (Score:2)
Re:There are too many incompatible versions of WIN (Score:2)
You also can't guarantee that these apps will continue working on newer versions of windows nor can you guarantee that older versions of windows will run on newer hardware, meaning you'l need to continue using old versions on old hardware which will become increasingly dangerous (no security patches) and difficult (no support for new protocols such as ipv6) to use in a networked environment.
Just in time for Longhorn... (Score:4, Funny)
Yep... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which would be the case if the new APIs mattered at all to existing applications, which they don't -- they will continue working just as well as they always have with the existing ones. Microsoft is quite anal about this. So no need to emulate Longhorn until apps actually depend on it, which won't be till some time after it's released, I think.
Re:Just in time for Longhorn... (Score:2)
Apps will still be written for old version of Windows (and Wine) for a long time.
Longhorn will rain on the parade... (Score:3, Insightful)
The have a lot of API to implement.
has anyone tried the directx9 patches? (Score:3, Interesting)
Curious what dx9 games people have thrown at it to see what works. Also wondering when these would make it in mainline.
Re:has anyone tried the directx9 patches? (Score:2)
Soon, A lot of refactoring has taken place and I've been trying to iron out the bugs outside of winecvs so that I can send in clean, reasonably well tested patches. Some work has already made it to mainline, and I've got some more work implementing stateblocks that should be going in tomorow.
I need to stop playing MMORPGs (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I need to stop playing MMORPGs (Score:3, Funny)
I can't be the only one who expected to see "<WINE Developers>" under each of the names in the group photo.
Will WINE be relevant? (Score:3, Insightful)
It just seems to me that Linux is coming into it's own. How much longer will it be before many programs are released for Windows and Linux? As more and more applications are released for both platforms WINE becomes less and less important.
I haven't purchased a new Windows program for some time now as Linux comes with everything I need for my day to day work. It would be nice to be able to run some of my older stuff under Linux but that's mostly games. I've supported WineX or whatever they are calling their product now days for years with monthly donations in the hopes that it will become very useful but still there are only a handful of games that run perfectly under WineX. Most don't run at all.
I'm thinking that rather that rewrite the Windows libraries we should concentrate on libraries like SDL that can be installed on both Windows and Linux thus giving the developer a uniform API that can targeted both OSes.
Re:Will WINE be relevant? (Score:2)
At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is wher
Linux desktop apps don't match Windows apps (Score:2)
Top of the list is email! There's nothing on Linux like Eudora, which some people may have kind of gotten working under WINE, but it beats me how. (Of course getting anything working under WINE is a challenge, given the "programmer's toy" setup. I am not a programmer or
Very (Score:2)
A.V.O.A.T. (Score:2, Funny)
Which, iconically, is the same group photo displayed on the website for A.V.O.A.T. (the Association of Virgins Over the Age of 20)...
[OT] About the virginity myths (was:A.V.O.A.T.) (Score:2)
It's really interesting how such myths spread. I think the most interesting things are just how much computer geeks are NOT foreign to sex.
Now, some of the new people I'm not sure about. If you take the intersection of the people from this year's photo and last year's photo [theshell.com], you'll have a hard time finding a wine hacker appearing in both that is not either married, or has had a GF for over half a year (You will find me in the bottom row in the new picture. Personally, I more or less belong in both catego
Wine has definitely matured in the last year or so (Score:2, Informative)
if you run ubuntu, check their downloads page for an up to date repository.
I'm currently seeing if GunBound will run on wine, so far so good, it inst
Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
Will Wine be able to run 64-bit Windows programs on FreeBSD or Linux amd64? Not any time soon...
Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
What? I don't mean to nitpick but I do believe that Unixes have been 64bit for quite some time. SGI/SUN/Tru64/AIX.... are all 64bit and have been for about 10 years or more. I wouldn't call that "moving into", I'd call that "well established".
Unix is not only (sort of)GNU/Linux or BSD. There are other machines out there other than your precious x86.
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
Running 32-bit Windows programs on a 64-bit Unix? Forget it...
32 bit Wine (and Win32 apps) runs today on a AMD64 running a 64 bit distro if you have installed the 32 bit libs for your distro.
It's not 100% native, but then running any Win32 program on a 64 bit OS isn't either...
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
The FreeBSD port (maintained by Gerald Pfeiffer) has been know to be broken in the past year, sometimes for a couple of months. Not necessarily Gerald's fault, sometimes there were new features introduced which just didn't work on FreeBSD until somebody took some time to port it (or FreeBSD supported something Wine began relying on). But when there are no Wine developers besides the FreeBSD port maintainer who uses it, it can take some time to implement those.
Also, I don't know what's the status of FreeBSD
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
I'm more interested in Windows/64 binaries -- there is no real reason, WINE should not be able to run them (the Word-viewer is a particularly useful "little" utility), but I'm sure, it will not for a long time...
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
I'm more interested in Windows/64 binaries
Don't expect this next week. Some parts of the needed work are there, but there's not a big enough push for it right now, so nobody really works on it.
Re:Wine perpetually several years behind... (Score:2)
September 30th? (Score:2)
Does that mean we can celebrate Serenity's release with two sets of Wine?
(Actually no, here in Oz we probably won't get it by then :( )
Re:Wine, the perfect emulator (Score:2, Informative)
Actually looks like it is possible [linuxjournal.com], haven't tried it myself though.
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:3, Informative)
As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator":
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:3, Interesting)
As Wine's name says: "Wine Is Not an Emulator"
I remember reading an article from one of the developers (think it was Tridge) where he was asked if Wine Is Not an Emulator, then what is it. His response was "basically an emulator".
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Tridge isn't listed in the AUTHORS file, nor in the Changelog file. He works on Samba.
And for the emulator part, Wine is actually another implementation of a standard (the Win32 API), along with various parts regarding the ABI.
You don't call a Yamah CD player an emulator either, right? After all, it's only an implementation of a Phillips/Sony standard, and for the disk, it's the same thing...
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2, Informative)
Wine implements the windows API. Linux implements the POSIX API.
API's aren't emulated, they are implemented.
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, Lame Ain't Mp3 Encoder, but it is, my head explodes!-)
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
I think the distinction made more sense 10 years ago when Wine was held alongside stuff like SoftPC, BOCHS and stuff like that.
The distinction was that the emulators were designed to emulate the CPU's instruction set, which resulted in dramatically worse performance, whereas Wine was restricted to the Intel architecture and just implemented the Win16/Win32s/Win32 API.
I don't think the distinction is all that meaningful anymore.
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Sam
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Did it ever occured to you that it might be the fault of an underlying driver (ATI, NVIDIA) if you're seeing slowdowns?
I don't say that it is actually the case, just a possibility. Along with the fact that OpenGL will do things in software if the hardware can't, instead of not listing the possibility to the program as DirectX on Windows does.
It could also be things related to thread priorities (Windows and Linux don't have the same rules to determine which thread will be the next to run on the CPU, so som
Re:Wine, the perfect "not an" emulator (Score:2)
Re:Wine, the perfect emulator (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies? (Score:2)
Re:Are WineHQ and CoderWavers enermies? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:no Win32 port... (Score:2)
We could call it WineOS and make it GPL. Hey that reminds me, what happened to ReactOS? Is it out of the radar or what?
Re:Demand and such (Score:2)
RTFA (Score:2)
If you had Read The Fine Article. You would have known that the WINE people invited the SAMBA people to their conference (and the two groups worked to plan their conferences one week apart in nearby locations) because there are things both projects need to do, so they may as well do them in compatible ways.
Both products need to emulate case insensitive names on a case sensitive filesystem. Both projects need to support Windows style file locks, which do not have a good Unix equivalent. They may as wel