For somebody with a sore hand, you type an amazing amount. I seem to have caught your "my-right-hand-is-hurting" bug. Well, actually it is my arm - utterly useless at anything at present, altough I can type if I position it at exactly the right angle...
I think everybody here agrees that Wine's biggest problem is theJames had an interresting reply to your mail around the time it takes for new developers to break into Wine. As a newbie myself, I have some thoughts on this... Ok, let's face it, Wine is damn hard. I have around 7 years experience in C++/C mostly on the Windows platform, altough I have done quite a number of personal projects under Linux, eg. XML interface into RPM, etc. I suppose Wine falls into this category, altough my contibution is not quite there, yet.
lack of developers. No developers, slow progress, no users, back
to no developers.
The reason why I like Wine so much is because it is extremely challenging. The beast is complex but (as I've read Jeremy White said before) things do take longer than anticipated. You need good understanding of Windows system calls plus Linux coding experience - a difficult combination to find. I think that a lot of people will look at the code, browse the web/bugzilla, be unable to find anything quick to break into the fold and give up.
Why are we in this position? For reasons I will not go into rightI personally think this is changing with CodeWeavers delivering commercial products based on Wine. As an example: the last time I played with wine was back in 96/97, I decided to take a serious look again after buying CXOffice and really seeing and reading and starting to believe... (Well, I must admit that I have been reading WWN since it's inception as well, just to get some sort of idea, so I haven't been completely out of touch.) So, yes, potentially you are right, but this is definately changing for the better.
now, it seems painfully obvious to me that we are suffering from
a severe case of Bad Public Image (tm).
How do we change this state of affairs? Well, people needWhat both you and James are referring to is making the process more transparent. People need clear deliverables to be able to focus and redirect their engergy towards something. With my newbie hat on, I can say that we don't provide that. Unless you have been around for a longish period of time, you have no real idea as to the state of affairs.
major events to reevaluate their opinions. Being major, they
are by definition few, and so we don't have too many chances.
For Wine, these events are the upcoming x.y releases.
I like both your and James' suggestions, in addition I would like to see the following:
1. Making sure that all tasks, big or small are in BugZilla. Make it easy to find - for instance, if I want to implement a DLL next, which one should it be? If you are not very, very familiar with Windows you wouldn't even know which DLL's on a Windows box are supposed to be replaced.
2. Making sure BugZilla is always updated anbd used in the right fashion. If something gets done, close the bug and make a comment. You need a record ort what has been happening. Remember that this is a real usefull developers-only (???) externtion to the website and makes their lives easier.
3. Better developers documentation, especially to get new guys onboard. (Erm, I think that was mentioned...)
I have quite a bit more to say, but I seem to have gottent the angle of the arm to the keyboard wrong at this point... So, that is it for now.
Greetings,
Jaco
