Wine-Staging 8.18 Brings Patch For An 8 Year Old Bug Report

[timofonic]

IIRC, the biggest issue with Wine is how conservative the maintainers are in regards to programming languages and coding standards which is why things like DXVK and vkd3d-proton live outside of Wine and why some patches can be in staging for so long. Where you see as bad project management, I see good project management. What I see is a symptom of not enough funding or manpower.

Granted, I'm not a Crossover user. $74 a year, $494 for life, is just too much for a custom Wine solution when, for free, I can go easy-mode by using GE or Lutirs provided Wine or Proton builds or slightly increase the difficulty and DIY either/or with TKG and then manage that with one of the umpteen Wine management tools.

This might sound kind of silly, but they start so many sentences with "But" and "And" on their website that I can't take them seriously. It isn't very professional. That's a lot of money to pay for unprofessionalism. I realize the irony of that statement coming from someone going by skeevy420. I give Michael a pass because he's a one man operation. They have a 52 person operation and they're currently hiring so they don't get that pass. They obviously have the money for an editor and/or proofreader. They don't have any excuse for bad grammar unless that's just their way of being a misfit rebel.

Since they have a "large" team and they're hiring, at least they don't seem to be wasting money on big executive bonuses.

You say good project management, then calificate them as unprofessional. You are extremely contradictory.

[skeevy420]

You say good project management, then calificate them as unprofessional. You are extremely contradictory.

Being good at project management and logistics doesn't equate to being good at branding and marketing. Being good at X doesn't make a person or entity good at Y.

They have a good product and have had good long-term management of that product. Just because I think that doesn't mean I can't think their current branding is a bit edgy and unprofessional.

oiaohm I counted 13x4 on their about page. Perhaps I counted wrong. It was early and I don't have the time to do a recount. That's why I said "large". I have no idea if that's large or not for Crossover.

Danniello It's less criticizing them and, about the alternatives, was just more of not having a need for their product since the free community and corporate options work for me. The only Windows things I use are games and their associated tools and that all works without their product. In that regard, if their product was cheaper I'd be more likely to try it out for the fun of it. Since my needs are suited, it isn't worth my money. Truth be told, I'd rather spend $74 on a game for my library of almost 300 that'll go towards Proton, DXVK, and vkd3d-proton if we're getting on an altruistic high horse all this. 30% of ~300 games has to have funded something Linux related.

I've mostly ever heard good things about Codeweavers. None of that changes that this was the first time I went to their site in a few years and went "Jeez" about it all.

[lorn10]

Yeah, - it really looks that some people just exists to criticize. How unfortunate.

I want to add here that old classic games like those from the DX9 era (and even older) are working as of 2023 better on Linux than on Windows 11!

And this is only possible because of Wine (in combination with Gallium Nine or DXVK).

So yeah, there is definitely a benefit to have a project like Wine.

[poncho524]

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=31322

Asking if application runs is kind of a very bad question to ask with wine. Yes itunes runs under wine as totally broken mess.

https://neal.fun/password-game/

Yes itunes in wine makes the password-game look fun.

I know about the db. I ask because it seems like a simple app, and I don't understand why it doesn't work. And hasn't for a long time.

[NotMine999]

Patch accumulating and resolving very old bugs is a symptom of bad project management.

I consider CodeWeavers structure isn't enough. No idea on what they waste the money, maybe upper management get big salaries.

496 patches seems a joke. 100? Too big but reasonable.

They could disguise situation the GNOME way, but that only would make situations worse.

Perhaps you should offer your incredible project management skills to the WINE Project.

I bet they would appreciate the contributions, if YOU can do better than what they have done so far.

[F.Ultra]

Patch accumulating and resolving very old bugs is a symptom of bad project management.

I consider CodeWeavers structure isn't enough. No idea on what they waste the money, maybe upper management get big salaries.

496 patches seems a joke. 100? Too big but reasonable.

They could disguise situation the GNOME way, but that only would make situations worse.

Looking at the actual bug entry it's clear that the patch was created separately and perhaps fixes the bug (it is still untested). Lots of old bugs in Wine is fixed in similar way where people just notices that their apps/games suddenly works, main reason why those are not fixed sooner or more deliberately is that it would require the WIne devs to have access to the very game/app that crashes.

[gukin]

After wine 8.9 staging I had to recompile wine outside outside of my distribution's package building tools to get wine64-preloader to work and as of 8.15 and 8.16 I couldn't build staging for i586. BUT as of 8.17.1 and 8.18 the staging guys got everything worked out and it all just builds and works so either my distro was broken or the staging guys tidied things up.

Either way, I appreciate the additions they make to wine and certainly in the past, staging cured quite a few difficult to deal with problems.

Thank you to the volunteers who have kept up wine staging, you and your work is appreciated!

[oiaohm]

I know about the db. I ask because it seems like a simple app, and I don't understand why it doesn't work. And hasn't for a long time.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/itunes-keeps-crashing-or-freezing-on-windows

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254560650

Itunes is not a simple application to deal with. Itunes loves being a crashing mess under Windows as well even worse has habit of being that way under Mac OS.

This makes itunes a serous problem to debug. Is itunes crashing because itunes is being itunes or is itunes crashing due to some wine code bug. Yes a developer attempting to get itunes to work can spend months going down the rabbit hole that the fault they think they are fixing that causes crash is iTunes normal behavior.

Also note that we cannot tell uses of itunes to use old versions either because those will crash when interacting with apple servers and that is by design.

Itunes as a program is absolutely not simple to work with. If you are used itunes more than 2 years and you have never had it play up you are really lucky.

[oiaohm]

oiaohm I counted 13x4 on their about page. Perhaps I counted wrong. It was early and I don't have the time to do a recount. That's why I said "large". I have no idea if that's large or not for Crossover.

Codeweavers 45 staff + 7 contractor shown on the about page giving the 52. Most companies don't show the people they contract. Yes there are people there that Codeweavers cannot legally employ directly due to their country.

Sorry I forgot about the contractors being on the about page. Codeweavers even as 52 is not a large team when you compare to to the windows development team writing new code into Windows all the time(in the process adding bugs).

Lot of the issues with wine being strict on patches being submitted is the serous problem of having to catch up with a development team that so far over resourced.

https://test.winehq.org/data/9d78031de6261f29d42e18db04f9925cfba24108/

Win7 8 reports Win8 4 reports Win1507+ 4 reports Win1709+ 3 reports Win1909+ 3 reports Win10 13 reports Win10L 15 reports Win11 3 reports

Yes each of those reports is a different copy of real MS windows with wine testsuite being run. The Mixed outcomes are really bad.

MS Windows has a huge development team that does a lot of changes across windows making wine job like trying to catch up to shifting sands.

Yes a program running under Windows and crashing under Wine for a User can happen when wine is doing perfect known behavior of Windows and MS Windows doing perfectly known behavior of windows.

Large active development team at Microsoft working on Windows is quite problem with the quality control issues that do get out. Microsoft does invest a lot in quality control. The next nightmare is Microsoft has shim after shim in SxS because they implemented something wrong in Windows and some application went and expect wrong so Microsoft cannot fix it across the board because its a major program,

Crossover/codeweavers team is very small once you understand the problem. Being very small end up requiring let be down right strict on quality control because we cannot afford to be going after issues we are introducing because Microsoft going to introduce enough into windows that application developers are going to code their applications to depend on that we have to deal with.

Core wine basically would not exist as a foundation without the strictness. The 1990s in wine history they tried being more lax in what they would accept in the core.

Yes bugs at times taking decades to get handled is sometimes lack of resources and sometimes that when you look at it Microsoft has not made up their mind how this area of Windows should function. There was a case in windows 7 where 12 updates in the row caused a function to function differently. Yes I mean 12 different ways of differently all incompatible with each other but their have been other spread out ones as well. Then on top of that you have differences between drivers with windows causing different behaviors.

Wine is absolutely not a simple project. MS Windows it self to copy is a nightmare.

[Danniello]

I know about the db. I ask because it seems like a simple app, and I don't understand why it doesn't work. And hasn't for a long time.

iTunes simple app?! SIMPLE app!??!?!

Hmmm... I'm not using Windows more than 10 years so perhaps I do not know what today is iTunes, but ~10 years ago it was NOT simple app.

It was BIG drive container that was very heavily integrating with Windows system - without it iPods/iPad/iPhones/iSomething was useless connected to Windows. Also if I remember correctly it was the only way to connect to iPod mp3, so it was extremely popular in USA especially.

Another thing is DRM... iTunes is also installing Apple proprietary DRM in Windows... DRM as itself is VERY heavy topic. As far as I know - wine is not supporting DRM at all (for example you cannot start Netflix in wine Firefox)...