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First Release Candidate of Wine 1.0 Released
moronikos writes to mention that the first release candidate of Wine 1.0 was announced and released into the wild today. This new version includes only bug fixes as the team is in a code freeze while pushing for the full 1.0 release.
Because WINE can run "Lander on the moon" from Windows 3.11 and Windows XP/later cannot.
Version number schemes vary between different software, and you'll have to ask WineHQ specifically what they mean to be at 1.0.
In the FOSS world, though, usually version 1.0 is a pretty big milestone showing that the software is complete, with few bugs known and little or no features missing. Some projects gone on for years in the 0.x numbers before ever getting to 1.0 (if ever). Wine itself started just naming it on the date (eg, Wine 20020314), but a couple years ago or so they started calling it 0.9.0 and so on.
Usually the big number in a version number represents important steps, though this can of course vary. For example, OpenBSD doesn't bother with making a fuss about what the number on the left means and they just increment by 0.1 always (after 3.9 came 4.0, and so on). GNU Emacs decided a long time ago that no complete rewrite would ever happen, and so they constantly increment the big number for large changes (they're at version 22.0 now). Hell, Netscape even decided to skip an entire number (4.7 -> 6.0) after the original company died and the new versions were based on the Mozilla project.
Actually they do say, what's their target for wine 1.0:
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria
- Photoshop CS2 tryout
- Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 97 and 2003
- Microsoft Word Viewer 97 and 2003
- Microsoft Excel Viewer 97 and 2003
That's all they're targeting. I think it's a great idea to get to that level first, then expand without regression.Put identity in the browser.
The long answer is that not all of the DirectX features are quite there, I don't know if it's current but there's an overview here. The result is that some games won't play without native DLLs. Doing that requires the Windows files and adding an override in winecfg. This was a much larger issue before than it is now and it keeps getting fewer that need these overrides.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really? I'm looking at that page and don't you know, it seems that Direct3D v9 is 95% supported...
The beef is described at
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleaseCriteria
In essence, 1.0 is just another release,
but with more stability (e.g. a month's
codefreeze and only very careful bugfixes)
and a few longstanding bugs
(e.g. serial I/O, dos apps) fixed not because
lots of people need them, but because it just
seemed wrong to reach 1.0 without fixing them.
Dan Kegel
Wine 1.0 Release Manager
Actually, Wine is an alternate implementation of the APIs, not an emulation of them. There's a difference, at least if you're using the words in a technical sense rather than a regular English sense. Which, when being pedantic about a technical matter, is the correct sense to use them in.
Alright guys, this release is 15 years in coming. I'm not aware of any other free software project that's taken 15 years to get to 1.0.
We know we've got some core architecture just right. That's taken a long time to get there. Now we have a lot of bug squashing to do and in many cases it's pretty amazing how quickly regressions can be found, bugs tracked, etc if we just have a few more eyes on this release.
So we put together a list of things you can do to help us out - check it out here:
1.0 regression hunting. And hey! We're giving out t-shirts to the folks who help us out the most.
Notice we didn't say anything about jumping in and writing code? You're certainly welcome to, and in some cases there might even be some low hanging fruit. However, without development experience on Wine's codebase your valuable time might best be spent regression testing your favorite game!
As always, thanks for all the support!
----- obSig