How to Help Squish Bugs

While adding new features is an important part of improving Wine, bugs directly affect the program's quality and user experience. There are several ways to help make Wine more robust with better performance, and most of them require little to no programming experience.

Working with Bugzilla

Wine uses Bugzilla (external link) to manage BugReports by users and streamline communication between testers and developers. By providing a web interface for easily editing and querying a bug database, the entire community can work together to fix problems as quickly as possible.

• If you have found problems while running a specific program, you can file BugReports in Wine's Bugzilla system

• Those that don't mind more bureaucratic tasks might enjoy helping with BugTriage

Sometimes, certain "challenges" are proposed to coordinate work on bug triage or specific problems:

• BugDay

• BugSquishParty

• DogfoodChallenge

• PlatinumRegressionHunt

Automated Tests

• Wine itself has a set of ConformanceTests that can be run automatically on Unix or Windows to test for bugs on your specific system

• Many popular open-source applications also have their own UnitTestSuites that can help find and narrow down bugs in Wine

Regression Testing

Sometimes new changes in recent versions of Wine unexpectedly revive old bugs, known as regressions. If you are comfortable with using Git and compiling Wine from source, you can do rapid RegressionTesting and help narrow down bugs to specific patches.

For Developers

If you want to track down bugs in the code itself (and possibly contribute fixes), there are many pages on the wiki with useful advice. If you're looking for some ideas or information on how to actually track down a bug:

• Be sure to read up on how to use Wine's built-in DebugChannels to do things like generate Backtraces

• Also look at the list of KnownIssues. These are major bugs that either require major changes or have been traced upstream.

• Some hints on using other tools, such as Valgrind for MemoryLeaks, gcov for CodeCoverage, and various programs for StaticAnalysis.

• There is a short list of DeveloperExamples that show the process behind finding and fixing real bugs

• Various debugging tricks that may be useful such as a patch for toggling debug traces or remotely debugging a Wine session from Visual Studio

There are also pages on debugging specific features in Wine, such as:

• Audio components like MIDI and techniques for MeasuringAudioLatency

• Improving the Performance of specific programs in Wine

• Frameworks such as Mono for .NET support and Direct3D graphics

• TestingLanguages to make sure dialogs display properly

If you want to want to write or modify some of Wine's automated tests, these pages will probably come in handy:

• Tips on WritingConformanceTests, including CmdConformanceTests (which need some unique features)

• Working with BuildBot, which automatically checks submitted patches for build errors

• Using the WineTestBot, which allows changes specifically to Wine's test suite to be checked automatically on several Windows VMs.

Some other miscellaneous pages related to quality assurance:

• A list of AvailableHardware (specifically GPUs) that various contributors have offered to use for testing patches.

CategoryQualityAssurance