WineConf 2005 Sets Deadline for Wine 0.9

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!"

Comments

I could be out of line...

[wcitech]

Call me crazy, but isn't it deadlines like these that cause software products to often be lacking? I might understand if this were a major for-profit corporation who NEEDED a release in order to satisfy their fiscal department, but isn't this an open-source not-for-profit project? Why have deadlines?

Re:I could be out of line...

[m50d]

Like debian, wine has been far too long without a stable release. By all means don't rush it, but you do need to actually release a working version once in a while. At the moment any stable version of wine is stable purely through luck - they're just cvs snapshots.

Re:I could be out of line...

[hey!]

And, if we deleted the word "cold" from the dictionary, we wouldn't have need for central heating anymore. ;-)

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.

Thanks to CodeWeavers

[XanC]

We use their fine product to allow library patrons to run MS Office on some of our public workstations. It's great to know how much they contribute back to Wine and the community.

Kudos to them!

Wine/Cross platform compatibility kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 know...

[MisanthropicProgram]

there will be no Wine before its time!

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

[alta]

Wow, all the women in that pictures really says a lot. ...Geeks

Group Photo

[dgos78]

All those bodies, and so little testosterone.

It's a joke! Sorry, I couldn't come up with anything else.

wine bugs havent seen enough work

[Eternal_Flame]

I like wine. I really do, I've been using it for over a year now and have never had many real (unsolveable) issues from the few win games I own or any other win32 app I feel like running under it.
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

Nerds

[Stibidor]

When I saw the group photo, I thought, "What a bunch of nerds!" And my heart longed to be there...