Wine-Staging 4.5 Comes In Smaller Thanks To More Patches Being Upstreamed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Wine-Staging 4.5 Comes In Smaller Thanks To More Patches Being Upstreamed

While Wine-Staging 4.4 was at 770 patches compared to upstream Wine for running Windows programs/games on Linux and elsewhere, this weekend's Wine-Staging 4.5 is down to 759 patches thanks to more of these improvements being deemed ready for upstream...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-Staging-4.5-Released

[cybertraveler]

Anyone know if Valve are playing a role in getting these staging patches upstreamed? Perhaps they are helping to clean up the patches to make them suitable for merging or perhaps they are adding tests to show that the patches do indeed mirror the general Windows API behaviour.

[R41N3R]

Anyone know if Valve are playing a role in getting these staging patches upstreamed? Perhaps they are helping to clean up the patches to make them suitable for merging or perhaps they are adding tests to show that the patches do indeed mirror the general Windows API behaviour.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Proton-Work-Back-In-Wine-4.2

[starshipeleven]

Anyone know if Valve are playing a role in getting these staging patches upstreamed? Perhaps they are helping to clean up the patches to make them suitable for merging or perhaps they are adding tests to show that the patches do indeed mirror the general Windows API behaviour.

Yes.
Good Guy Valve at work.

[Venemo]

Anyone know if Valve are playing a role in getting these staging patches upstreamed? Perhaps they are helping to clean up the patches to make them suitable for merging or perhaps they are adding tests to show that the patches do indeed mirror the general Windows API behaviour.

Valve probably has a hand in it too, but a lot of it is actually thanks to Alistair Leslie-Hughes (the current Wine Staging maintainer).

[oiaohm]

Valve probably has a hand in it too, but a lot of it is actually thanks to Alistair Leslie-Hughes (the current Wine Staging maintainer).

Close there are two Wine Staging maintainers. Alistair Leslie-Hughes and Zebediah Figura both have done a lot of work getting wine staging patches upstream and keeping wine staging running.

https://github.com/wine-staging/wine...s/contributors Yes Alistair is the more active at this time in keeping the staging branch functional and Zebediah is more active patches pushed to wine patches list. Both are up-streaming patches and both are doing some staging branch maintenance just the ratios are different. Without both of them patches would not be up-streaming at the rate they are.

The big change with the restart of wine staging was the fact it ceased to be a single maintainer project. Wine staging is still open to more official maintainers if anyone wants to step forwards.

Also other than the big spike since restart of wine-staging the number of patches required per month to keep wine-staging functional have in fact decreased.

The decreasing patch set count will keep on helping with staging maintenance issues.

Valve developers at this stage appears busy enough with the patches they added to proton that are not in Wine staging or Wine mainline that they are up-streaming into Wine mainline. This indirectly helps wine staging as in some cases Valve fixes X in wine mainline and Y work around patch in staging now comes pointless so can be deleted.

The work around patches cases are triggered deletes in wine staging by wine work upstream work are normally completely wrong because because the developer patched the wrong section to wine. So Valve fixes X in upstream wine and Y patch in wine staging goes away you can swap the Valve name for a few different parties. So there is some interaction between Valve work and Wine Staging work just not direct at this stage. Of course this could change in future.

Still its a lot of work to clean up the patches Valve have created for proton to get particular games to work from hacks to in fact correct code.

[stiiixy]

So, does Steam reacquire whole games every time you apply a proton (winebottle) version? It seems to be doing that for me, which is a little bit nuts when you're talking hundreds of gigs.

[oiaohm]

So, does Steam reacquire whole games every time you apply a proton (winebottle) version? It seems to be doing that for me, which is a little bit nuts when you're talking hundreds of gigs.

This unfortunately makes sense if they are not caching the game installer. It is kind of required to reinstall lots of games because they set values in registry based on what they detected on install. I don't know if steam is doing this I do know doing wine support when someone has a issue with wine version changes one of the things you recommend a clean install in prefix to remove installer set registry value caused issues so valve might be doing this to avoid these random issues..

[stiiixy]

This unfortunately makes sense if they are not caching the game installer. It is kind of required to reinstall lots of games because they set values in registry based on what they detected on install. I don't know if steam is doing this I do know doing wine support when someone has a issue with wine version changes one of the things you recommend a clean install in prefix to remove installer set registry value caused issues so valve might be doing this to avoid these random issues..

That CAN make sense, to a degree. Would be nice to have default registry keys in the wine profile for that game instead, though. Games aren't THAT complex they cant do a forced/defaulted reset on the registry, including your game profile which would like need a manual back up. Downloading so much data seems an abusive waste of time, effort and cost shunted to the users.

[oiaohm]

That CAN make sense, to a degree. Would be nice to have default registry keys in the wine profile for that game instead, though. Games aren't THAT complex they cant do a forced/defaulted reset on the registry, including your game profile which would like need a manual back up. Downloading so much data seems an abusive waste of time, effort and cost shunted to the users.

Games are horrible complex at times particularly once you get into some of the digital rights management and anti-cheating code. Anti cheating bring in instance id stuff with instance id stuff you cannot do hey lets put default keys in registry then run game as each install instance needs to be unique and the instance id is based on hardware configurations of the platform the game is on. New version of wine so games perform improves need to change configuration settings so needs new install and new instance id .

This is why I said cache the installer there are some items where the only path is reinstall. Yes Steam could white list some games that can redo their registries or take defaults. There will be some that will be clean install.

People find this under windows with some games change Nvidia graphics card for AMD and some games die under windows until they are reinstalled clean as well so this is not a wine only behaviour. Steams current method is like using a sledge hammer to put in a required nail. There is a nail that needs to be put in just need to work out how todo it with a smaller hammer..