This brings me back to the early days of my Linux usage. I've always been fascinated by this project.
My very nerdy dream has always been to try to contribute to it somehow. How hard is it to get in to the community?
My very nerdy dream has always been to try to contribute to it somehow. How hard is it to get in to the community?
I find this attitude odd, because there are (at least) tens of thousands of wine installs under Debian alone. Surely the information is relevant and useful to people, even if the version is no longer officially supported.
As a result, I've stopped wasting my time filing reports only to have them rejected.
At some point vendors - especially open source vendors with limited (volunteer) resources have to call time on supporting older versions. If you're running an unsupported version, and the new version is free to download and install, why would they go out of their way to support you? Their thinking is quite reasonable: it's your choice to use a distro that doesn't track releases frequently, pull down and build a later version from them.
And looking at the release notes 6000+ changes have probably happened since your release. How can they possibly support you and a few thousand Debian users in that scenario with such a small team so focused on so much work?
I said that the information in the user report could be relevant and useful to people who still use that version, even if it's unsupported.
These are informational reports of "this app behaves this way under version x." So, and this is isn't about supporting an old version, this is about allowing or not allowing information about old versions in a database.
I don't think more information is harmful to the users, especially when it can help them make an informed decision about whether or not they must upgrade in order to be able to run a particular app.
They're rejecting your reports because the issues are often fixed in newer versions - someone would have to re-confirm your reports on a newer version.
Sure, newer versions fix bugs from older versions. But they don't delete/archive the old reports after a new release, so the reports that are there are already a mix of supported and unsupported versions anyway.
So, I don't see the harm in accepting new reports against older versions, particularly when old versions are still found several major distros (particularly the LTS versions of those distros)
I run it on top of Debian testing.
Maybe the policy about rejecting debian reports came way before they setup the repository.
Your best bet is to fire up a program you want to use under Wine with logging enabled. Look for functions that aren't implemented and submit patches, repeat!
One area where I've found Wine personally very useful over the years is understanding the Windows API. Without access to Windows source, access to the Wine source can be the next best thing to understand what a particular API should be doing. (Of course, it's been a while since I've written any Win32 code.)