Code quality (was Re: comctl32: Fix invalid syntax)
L. Rahyen
research at science.su
Fri Feb 8 19:13:34 CST 2008
On Friday February 8 2008 04:41:28 Bang Jun-young wrote:
> That's the main reason why Wine keeps crashing every time I give it a
> try with my Windows apps.
> ...
> I see something fundamentally wrong with development process.
I think that current development process isn't a problem at all. In fact AJ
is very good at what he is doing!
As far as I understand your patch ("comctl32: Fix invalid syntax.") was
rejected just because you forgot to add proper (descriptive) changelog entry.
What is the real problem is the lack of testers (who report regressions and
bugs) and developers. This is why WINE still has a lot of bugs, regressions
are quite common thing to happen, etc. To fix this, more people should read
wine-patches and test patches before they are committed, more people should
write bug reports, more people should be involved in the development, and so
on. Unfortunately, not all people have enough time for such tasks.
However, WINE is pretty usable today.
> Since 1993, Wine has never gotten to the
> point where everybody could rely on it for his daily work. It has as
> awfully many bugs as Win95.
WINE can work reliably even with very complex programs (such as Photoshop
CS - I use it pretty often). And if you don't see BIG improvement in last
years you either tried very few Windows programs or you are very unlucky...
In my practice WINE run most of the programs I try (well, I didn't tried
thousands of Windows programs and there is no "hardcore" gamers in my family
so my statistic may be biased). In fact, it is so good that I typically can
rely on it to run any program I'm downloading from the Internet (success
rate for me is more than 85% for "small" and "average" programs/games
downloadable for free from the Internet). And if Windows program(s) work
correctly on WINE, cases of "random" crashes are very rare. They (generally)
do exist but most of Windows programs aren't affected by such bugs - much
more often you find repeatable crashes after specific sequence(s) of steps.
And your statement "Wine has never gotten to the point where everybody could
rely on it for his daily work" is strange. In fact it is true for Windows too
(Windows never gotten to the point where everybody could rely on it for his
daily work). Maybe you just mean that WINE doesn't work well for you and some
(or maybe even most) other people? But working well for some people or for
nobody is very different things... There is a lot of people who use WINE for
their daily tasks.
For example, I and whole my family use Linux and WINE on daily basis (because
of dependency on some Windows software and Windows games). There is no
Windows installed on our computers (only I have Windows XP in VMWare for my
very specific purposes to run Autodesk products).
In my practice WINE and Linux are absolutely stable (if no bugs in WINE
triggered by the program of course). In fact, I have trading station for
Windows working 24 hours per day on my Linux server with WINE (if trading
station fail or crash, I potentially can lose real money). And for this
purpose (which by definition requires high stability) WINE+Linux works
MUCH better than Windows XP.
And your comparison of WINE with Windows 95 isn't true at all. Did you
actually ever tried to use Windows 95? It will fail MUCH more often than
WINE, and WINE can run more Windows programs than Windows 95 (I have it in
VMWare so I really tested this with some programs year ago or so, "just for
fun"). Even Windows 98 cannot run many important programs such as Photoshop
(it require at least Windows 2000). And Windows 95/98 have a LOT of "random"
crashes; WINE is much better - for many programs it can work for months 24
hours per day without problems, and even if it crashes in some cases, other
programs aren't affected (especially if they are launched from different
prefix).
Everything above is my personal experience, and for some users it may be
worse. But for me, WINE work good enough for daily use, even for very
important applications. So you can consider my story as
yet-another-success-story-of-using-WINE.
Obviously, this doesn't mean that WINE is good enough for everyone... But at
least it is good enough for me, my family and some of my friends. There is
some minor problems (for example, my brother have some games that don't work
on WINE at all but he doesn't care very much about this) so WINE isn't
perfect of course... But I just want to say that it is good enough for daily
work and gaming at least for some people, and a lot of Windows software is
usable on Linux with WINE.
Personally, I think that AJ and all other WINE developers are doing very
great and important work! Big thanks to all of them...
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