0.9.17 and other issues
Hello AllBy all respect of all the hard work the developers make all day. But to see the changes in 0.9.17 makes me really angry. Is everybody developing for the gamers? Whats the focus of the wine development? Currently I have many bugzilla bugs open to be fixed to get business applications running. And I can see while testing my 10 application with every release that nothing had changed on the business apps. All of them are the same unstable, or installable or some bugs else (see printing issues etc). I know thats cool developing gaming features but THAT CANNOT BE THE GOAL! In the offices I support as admin/sys engineer, we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely. But all I can see is that all the bugs are already there from release to release! But on every release I read some things about DirectX, Gaming Support etc. Whould it not be better just to fix the existing bugs before developping new ones? All the people I know WANT TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS APPS ON LINUX. Nobody wants run games. So my question again: WHATS THE FOCUS OF THE WINE DEVELOPMENTRoland Kaeser
Re: 0.9.17 and other issues
By all respect of all the hard work the developers make all day. But to see the changes in 0.9.17 makes me really angry. Is everybody developing for the gamers? Actually I would say that the majority of developers are working on features not directly related to games. Whats the focus of the wine development? I know thats cool developing gaming features but THAT CANNOT BE THE GOAL! An open source project doesn't have the goal - it has many goals that suit the various parties contributing to development. There's no reason why work can't be done to make business applications and games work at the same time. If you have a strong interest/need to make business apps run, I'd suggest you hire developer(s) to work on the project. In the offices I support as admin/sys engineer, we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely. But all I can see is that all the bugs are already there from release to release! I'm sure additional contributors are welcome :) Nobody wants run games. You're wrong - that's my primary reason for using wine (and my focus of development). Therefore at least one person wants to run games.
Re: 0.9.17 and other issues
Roland Kaeser wrote: In the offices I support as admin/sys engineer, we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely. But all I can see is that all the bugs are already there from release to release! So you have three choices: 1) Fix bugs yourself, and guide Wine development as you see fit. 2) Pay somebody else to fix bugs. 3) Keep waiting... Mike
AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
the goal is to implement the win32 APIs on top of unix. this doesneither exclude the gamers nor the "appers".No that wasn't my idea. But remember the mission: Bring the people to Linux! It's just a matter of priorization. What brings more people to linux? You have right: The business apps. So what's more important?so why not support that efford by donating some of your time or money(e.g. your employers) to fix the problems? recently there where theauditions for the summer of code - why not advocate then to make thingsbetter? why not try crossover's wine?Sorry, I can just program Java but no C nor C++. And my salery is just enough to life. But as soon crossover supports my core required business apps I will surely buy one and will strongly recommend my circly of friends to do the same. Its also my opinion to support crossover for their work. But does it makes sense to buy a software which would currently be usesless for me?you have many options - but instead you have chosen to whine to a listof developers that spend their free time to improve the things they haveproblems with; what do you think this will help?My most other freetime goes also into opensource projects or projects which promotes opensource (such as the yearly linux installation parties). It wasn't my intent to "whine" on the list but sometimes it required to give the people a soft kick in ass. - Ursprüngliche Mail Von: Christoph Frick [EMAIL PROTECTED]An: Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED]CC: wine-devel@winehq.orgGesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 13:11:29 UhrBetreff: Re: 0.9.17 and other issuesOn Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:02:31AM +, Roland Kaeser wrote: I know thats cool developing gaming features but THAT CANNOT BE THE GOAL!the goal is to implement the win32 APIs on top of unix. this doesneither exclude the gamers nor the "appers". In the offices I supportas admin/sys engineer, we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely.so why not support that efford by donating some of your time or money(e.g. your employers) to fix the problems? recently there where theauditions for the summer of code - why not advocate then to make thingsbetter? why not try crossover's wine?you have many options - but instead you have chosen to whine to a listof developers that spend their free time to improve the things they haveproblems with; what do you think this will help? But on every release I read some things about DirectX, Gaming Support etc.Whould it not be better just to fix the existing bugs before developping new ones? All the people I know WANT TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS APPS ON LINUX. Nobody wants run games.you state yourself, that lots of features (that are announce-worthy) arefor games and you think no one cares for games? do you think they aredone for the pure fun of it? have you actually checked the ChangeLog ofthe current release? do you think all this changes in ole, msxml, c.dlls are done for the pure fun of it? if so - why not join the fun?-- cu
AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
If you want to get more business applications working in wine, you arewelcome to contribute to that yourself. Submit patches, or donatemoney or software to developers. Write letters to businessesregistering your interest in having their applications run in wine orLinux. Help do quality assurance; find and report bugs for theseapplications, and write tests for wine to run. There are many thingsyou can do to help. The other developers are already helping with whatthey do best.I'll do my best in supporting wine. I'm application maintainer of Corel Draw 9 and Railroad Tycoon (I know also a game). But I'm not a C Programmer and I can do this just small part time. But I try everything to get the people to linux and tell them that wine can run teir business apps on it but when they give me the apps (they need to run Linux) and I'm gonna test it, I regurlary get serious errors on that apps in case of very old bugs. For sample: most of the people in the office depend on MS Office 2003 and some other small apps. I also cannot understand this in case of the much better openoffice. But they wan't their licensed office. But currently its not installable in case of very old (and well documented) bugs in MSI. Or the other ones from Corel Draw: Printing is currently impossible in case of wrong processing of the generated print data in wine. Its also a very old bug. The same with copy/paste (ole32) or PDF export (msvcrt) in Corel Draw. There are a lot of other old issues which primarily prevents 90% of the required apps to run. If the developers whould start a work to clean up all the old bugs whould enable thousands of apps to work on wine. I think its not that hard work (for Your experienced programmers) but it should be done.Roland- Ursprüngliche Mail Von: n0dalus [EMAIL PROTECTED]An: Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED]CC: wine-devel@winehq.comGesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 12:49:26 UhrBetreff: Re: 0.9.17 and other issuesOn 7/11/06, Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By all respect of all the hard work the developers make all day. But to see the changes in 0.9.17 makes me really angry. Is everybody developing for the gamers?Whats the focus of the wine development? Currently I have many bugzilla bugs open to be fixed to get business applications running. And I can see while testing my 10 application with every release that nothing had changed on the business apps.All of them are the same unstable, or installable or some bugs else (see printing issues etc). I know thats cool developing gaming features but THAT CANNOT BE THE GOAL!In the offices I supportas admin/sys engineer, we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely. But all I can see is that all the bugs are already there from release to release! But on every release I read some things about DirectX, Gaming Support etc. Whould it not be better just to fix the existing bugs before developping new ones? All the people I know WANT TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS APPS ON LINUX. Nobody wants run games. So my question again: WHATS THE FOCUS OF THE WINE DEVELOPMENTDon't be angry because volunteer developers are doing what intereststhem. You'll find that the paid wine (codeweavers) developers do a lotof work to get business applications working under wine, while thevolunteer developers do whatever interests them at the time (oftengames). These people have great skills to contribute to wine, even ifit's in an area you think should not be a goal.n0dalus.
AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
Yes, that is noticable - it makes you so angry that you write somethings in a style that could be a bit more polite.Sorry, wasn't my intention to attack the people. But understand my desperation at this time. I'm just very hardly waiting until all the required apps getting work to migrate a lot of people in the office and at home to linux But every hope from release to release that the time has come to do this was destroyed. All the people I know WANT TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS APPS ON LINUX.You seem to be rather limited in the diversity of the people you know;-)No, what I ment was that the people doesn't want to run games but instead their other small tools and toys (which where included in "Business Apps"Just to give a little picture: Your neighbor likes to do gardening andsuch. What you are complaining about would be similar to going over tohim and complaining that he was setting up a new flower bed while hecould be fixing your roof. Just think about it a bit.Yes, I understand what You mean. But its not just for me (personally) it will help the whole comunity when getting this bugs fixed. I'm just a member of this community which tries their best to promote and support opensource as much as it possible. So I do a lot of my freetime in promoting opensource and developing opensource apps (as Java Programmer). And from my point of view, its also important to bring the people to Linux. And sometimes (specially in this case) I gonna fight for linux (in my sourrounding areas) and doesn't get adequate supply from the programmers front.- Ursprüngliche Mail Von: Joerg Mayer [EMAIL PROTECTED]An: Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED]Gesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 13:53:43 UhrBetreff: Re: 0.9.17 and other issuesOn Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:02:31AM +, Roland Kaeser wrote: By all respect of all the hard work the developers make all day. But to see the changes in 0.9.17 makes me really angry.Yes, that is noticable - it makes you so angry that you write somethings in a style that could be a bit more polite. Is everybody developing for the gamers?No, lots of stuff seems to go into installer/ole improvements as well.Please check the commit-list for details. Whats the focus of the wine development?There is no such focus - or there are several of them. It depends whoyou ask:- If you ask the people who do "game development", then you will get the answer "to make games (better) playable". Most/all of them are people who do this in their spare time without payment. From time to time, these people find/fix some non-game-related-bugs. That's how you profit from game development too.- If you ask the people being (partly) payed by Codeweavers, then yes, they work application focused. Of course, they work on the applications that Codeweavers supports first, so if you want preferential treatment for your applications, you should talk to Codeweavers and pay them to work on your applications. As a side effect though, currently every msi installer that doesn't work seems to be considered a bug and gets preferential treatment too.- Other people working on wine may have other goals (like security/cryptography/webbrowsing). All the people I know WANT TO RUN THEIR BUSINESS APPS ON LINUX.You seem to be rather limited in the diversity of the people you know;-) WHATS THE FOCUS OF THE WINE DEVELOPMENTIf you ask 10 developers, you might end up with 11 or more answers.Again: 3D is being developed by volunteers who do what they want to do.They rarely break something outside 3D and occasionally fix/implementthings outside 3D, so even non-games profit a bit from their work.Just to give a little picture: Your neighbor likes to do gardening andsuch. What you are complaining about would be similar to going over tohim and complaining that he was setting up a new flower bed while hecould be fixing your roof. Just think about it a bit.Regards Joerg-- Joerg Mayer [EMAIL PROTECTED]We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff thatworks. Some say that should read Microsoft instead of technology.
Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
On Tuesday 11 July 2006 08:50, Roland Kaeser wrote: the goal is to implement the win32 APIs on top of unix. this does neither exclude the gamers nor the appers. No that wasn't my idea. But remember the mission: Bring the people to Linux! It's just a matter of priorization. What brings more people to linux? You have right: The business apps. I know quite a bunch of guys who were brought to Linux by one of the following: software development tools, scientific software, multimedia tools, and Cedega. In fact I know of more people who were brought to Linux by NON-business apps. So what does that prove? Just that we know different types of people and that you should keep your eyes open for other possibilities. So what's more important? I'd say it's most important that you understand that business apps are not the end-all be-all, because you seem quite fixated on those. so why not support that efford by donating some of your time or money (e.g. your employers) to fix the problems? recently there where the auditions for the summer of code - why not advocate then to make things better? why not try crossover's wine? Sorry, I can just program Java but no C nor C++. And my salery is just enough to life. Use your imagination. Entice other people to do the work. Every little bit helps. Do testing. Do documentation. There's so much besides coding that can be done. But as soon crossover supports my core required business apps I will surely buy one and will strongly recommend my circly of friends to do the same. If everyone would think that way, noone would ever buy it. But does it makes sense to buy a software which would currently be usesless for me? No. You don't have to buy it. There are other ways to help. My most other freetime goes also into opensource projects or projects which promotes opensource (such as the yearly linux installation parties). It wasn't my intent to whine on the list but sometimes it required to give the people a soft kick in ass. You deserve one yourself. And a hard one at that. Cheers, Kuba
Re: 0.9.17 and other issues
On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 12:50:40PM +, Roland Kaeser wrote: the goal is to implement the win32 APIs on top of unix. this does neither exclude the gamers nor the appers. But remember the mission: Bring the people to Linux! It's just a matter of priorization. What brings more people to linux? You have right: The business apps. So what's more important? i have never joined that mission. people are free to do/use whatever they want. also i have my _strongest_ doubts about the apps-vs-games theory, but - like you? - i have no numbers to prove it; so i just shut up. -- cu pgpXXMIEpvSb5.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
HeyThats not nice to write such things. (also the things in the previous mails). Sounds more as Microsoft than opensource. The argument that everybody has its own goals is one of the current biggest problems of the opensource community (as also readt in the editorial of the professional computer magazine C't (in german area)). This namly means also that there is no coordination. You should better make a step back and see the whole picture. There is whole issue at the opensource community and everybody should not just ask what the can do to improve their own environment. Its the goal to improve the whole environment. So just look over the horizon. What made the PC to that allround machine it is today? Sorry to tell You hat, meight be a shock for You: It weren't the developers or scientific users. It were the small business users who wanted to run their excel and word. So if anybody here wan'ts Linux to get success the Linux tools MUST take care about this users because this users will make the decision about the future of Linux. And they will not go out business just because the use of MS Office. They rater will forward support microsoft by using their desktops. Just THINK: If we can provide them a Linux desktop with their ms office. Will they not rater switch later completely to opensource? How will you show them the benefits of opensource when they just know their virus contaminated windows desktop and make the admins crazy. Roland- Ursprüngliche Mail Von: Kuba Ober [EMAIL PROTECTED]An: Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED]Gesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 15:40:19 UhrBetreff: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues For sample: most of the people in the office depend on MS Office 2003 and some other small apps. I also cannot understand this in case of the much better openoffice. But they wan't their licensed office.It's their problem that they like to waste money on MS Office. I'd say good for them, let them bleed money. Maybe they'll go out of business. Out of the business gene pool -- so much the better for everyone. I wish them what they deserve.Cheers, Kuba
Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
I think the basic point is, everbody here is doing what he *can* do. _For free!_ Also, it seems somewhat unfortunate for you, that your apps refuse to work, granted. But most of the Applications I'm trying to run /do run/. And by the time (within the last 6 months) they started doing so *without* having to install MSI, DCOM nor Internet Explorer. That's pretty much a good piece of work done. (What's up with MDAC, all you folks here, huh? XD) Also, I see most of the installers became able to run and install their software *without* having to use a native Windows installation to run the setup. What is Office2003 under WINE good for, if you will be still in the need for Windows to install it? That, plus there are _enough_ open source tools, utilities and applications having the same purpose as many Windows applications, e.g. OpenOffice which pretty much gives everything needed to the *average* Word/Excel/Access/Powerpoint user. Many customers I know tend to use such products instead of buying expensive Microsoft licenses, which is actually one of the goals of using /open source/ and /Linux/, right?
re: 0.9.17 and other issues
Roland Kaeser wrote: [I have ten open bugs against business apps, why aren't they fixed yet?] Well, let's see. Here are your bugs: http://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?emailreporter2=1emailtype2=substringemail2=roli8200 It looks like there are a few things you could do to speed things up. Let's look at one of them: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4665 is waiting for you to do the regression analysis to find out which patch caused the bug. (It's not that hard to use git-bisect, really. You should try it!) This is required because there is no freely downloadable demo for corel 9 anymore; if you want it fixed, you have to help here. http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4971 is waiting on you to provide more info. That's for Corel Draw 12, which does still have a freely downloadable demo, but you didn't add the 'download' keyword to the bug, so people looking for bugs to fix in downloadable demos wouldn't have found it. - Dan
Getting Help With Bugs (was: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues)
Roland Kaeser wrote: snip silly messages going back and forth about opensource The following is not specific for you, but something I hope can help others out that are in your situation: There are a number of things you can do to make your bugs more likely to be fixed by volunteer developers: 1 File a bug! 2. Describe the bug accurately. If it is not completely obvious, describe what the program should be doing and what actually happens. 3. Only describe one bug per bugzilla entry, unless you think they are related. Doing otherwise will probably cause your second problem to be ignored. 4. Provide debug messages printed when reproducing the bug. 5. Use a standard Wine configuration. This includes not mixing native and builtin DCOM dlls and not using WineTools. In fact, try to use as many builtin DLLs as possible. 6. Try to reproduce the bug in a freely downloadable version of the application (for example, a demo or trial version) and provide a link in the bug. (Note that having to fill in a form with details to download a program puts me off trying to fix a bug, but others' opinions may be different.) 7. If you suspect the bug is in a certain component due an error message in a dialog box or on the console and you know which debug channel it corresponds to then attach a log of that debug channel to the bug. 8. Be repsonsive to developers asking for you to retest, try different dlls and create debug logs. You can be pro-active, but be careful to not be annoying. Deriding Wine or Wine developers is likely to be seen as annoying and your bug will be ignored. Testing the bug on each release of wine (or on a less regular basis) and reporting its status is welcomed and will show that you care about the bug being fixed and that you will be responsive if a developer investigates the bug further. -- Rob Shearman
AW: Getting Help With Bugs (was: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues)
HelloThanks. These are good ideas. I hope I have done my best yet to support the developpers. I had already good feedbacks with patches to test against a wine version for fixing a certain problem. But also sometimes I don't have the time (other things keep me really busy) to make that wide testes. As far as I see that I can file a useful bug report with less than a half day I see to get the time to make more intense tests to get a good quality bug report. On other side, I also see bugs which are completely (or no fix replay) untouched since they where reported. See Bugs #3599 #3611 #3800. The other part is (and I think I'm not alone with this) that I can only maintain a limited apps at a time. There whould be much more apps to maintain (the ones I know from my daily business) but currently I don't have the resources to do this. So I hoped that I can start with a "most important list" and work on this list as maintainer until they are completely working with wine to go forward for new ones to get them working. But I noticed that I working still on the same count of apps. Maybe i'ts not important for all but here a small list of the apps which are regulary requested to be working on Linux (out of the box): - Corel Draw 9-13 (much often, not just by myself) - MS Office XP / 2003 (specially Outlook and Access) (sorry) - MS Project (sorry again) - Photoshop / Illustrator / InDesign - Adobe Premiere (I know its nearly impossible) - Lotus Notes (6.5.x / 7.0) - DentalLab XP (a small erp solution for Dental Technicans) - The Nokia Sync Software for their mobiles - Serveral Tools to feed GPS navigation PDA's - Adobe Acrobat (Professional) (I don't know why) - NavBox Pro Plan (Aviatics Application) (private pilots) - PCMet (Meteo app for aviatices (private pilots)) - AustroControl (Meteo app for aviatices (private pilots)) - Pocket FMS (Navigation Software etc.) I know there are a lot of others which I cannot rember yet. It whould need to take a small survey but I know there are others.I also know that for the most of the listed apps are good linux equivalents avialable. As I said before, its (my) goal to bring the people frist to a linux desktop. switching from the windows apps to their linux alternatives can be made later when theyself recognize that the native linux app is more powerful than their windows version.Roland- Ursprüngliche Mail Von: Robert Shearman [EMAIL PROTECTED]An: Roland Kaeser [EMAIL PROTECTED]CC: wine-devel@winehq.orgGesendet: Dienstag, den 11. Juli 2006, 17:17:55 UhrBetreff: Getting Help With Bugs (was: Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues)Roland Kaeser wrote: snip silly messages going back and forth about opensourceThe following is not specific for you, but something I hope can help others out that are in your situation:There are a number of things you can do to make your bugs more likely to be fixed by volunteer developers:1 File a bug!2. Describe the bug accurately. If it is not completely obvious, describe what the program should be doing and what actually happens.3. Only describe one bug per bugzilla entry, unless you think they are related. Doing otherwise will probably cause your second problem to be ignored.4. Provide debug messages printed when reproducing the bug.5. Use a standard Wine configuration. This includes not mixing native and builtin DCOM dlls and not using WineTools. In fact, try to use as many builtin DLLs as possible.6. Try to reproduce the bug in a freely downloadable version of the application (for example, a demo or trial version) and provide a link in the bug. (Note that having to fill in a form with details to download a program puts me off trying to fix a bug, but others' opinions may be different.)7. If you suspect the bug is in a certain component due an error message in a dialog box or on the console and you know which debug channel it corresponds to then attach a log of that debug channel to the bug.8. Be repsonsive to developers asking for you to retest, try different dlls and create debug logs. You can be pro-active, but be careful to not be annoying. Deriding Wine or Wine developers is likely to be seen as annoying and your bug will be ignored. Testing the bug on each release of wine (or on a less regular basis) and reporting its status is welcomed and will show that you care about the bug being fixed and that you will be responsive if a developer investigates the bug further.-- Rob Shearman
Re: 0.9.17 and other issues
Roland Kaeser wrote: But to see the changes in 0.9.17 makes me really angry. Please do not get upset. Is everybody developing for the gamers? No. Unpaid Developer are developing what is on there Interests. Currently I have many bugzilla bugs open to be fixed to get business applications running. And I can see while testing my 10 application with every release that nothing had changed on the business apps. As an Example for Printing, Wine uses cups to detect Printers and lpr to send the Data to the printer, but the Printing-Framework is in most Places at the Level of Win3.1. All of them are the same unstable, or installable or some bugs else (see printing issues etc). I'm working on Printing in my Free Time, but to fix the Issues in the correct way, many low level - Things are needed first. (Printing ToDo-List: http://wiki.winehq.org/Printing ) As an Example for the new-Style Printing-Dialog (bug #4342), we can create a fast hack and Reuse the old-Style Printing-Dialog. Fix the Bug in the correct way need Patches for comdlg32 and shell32.dll and an almost full Implementation of compstui.dll (I already added an empty stub) and printui.dll (still missing). Since the Documentation is really rare for this Area, a lot of Tests are Required to understand and verify, what windows is doing here. Everybody is welcome to help! we are all waiting for wine becomes stable enough to get the business apps running to switch to linux completely. But all I can see is that all the bugs are already there from release to release! You can hire a Developer to fix the Issues. But on every release I read some things about DirectX, Gaming Support etc. Many People are Interested only in Games. Whould it not be better just to fix the existing bugs before developping new ones? That's what the DirectX-People do: Fixing the bugs in wine, that are related to Display-Errors. Nobody wants run games. There is a Company in Canada, which has only a single Product (based on an old wine-Version), that allow the paying Customers to play Windows-Games on Linux. So my question again: WHATS THE FOCUS OF THE WINE DEVELOPMENT Run Windows-Applications on Unix. -- By By ... ... Detlef
Re: AW: 0.9.17 and other issues
That, plus there are _enough_ open source tools, utilities and applications having the same purpose as many Windows applications, e.g. OpenOffice which pretty much gives everything needed to the *average* Word/Excel/Access/Powerpoint user. Heck, I always disliked MS Word interface via Visual Basic. I tried to do some pretty advanced document-generation with it and it just too cumbersome to my liking. Doable, but it just felt bed. I tried recently to implement the same thing with OO Basic and it was actually easier, even with sometimes inadequate documentation. So even for a non-average user OO.org has benefits (did for me). CHeers, Kuba
