Wine Release Plan

Release Schedule

New releases of Wine happen about every two weeks. Here are a few key release dates:

• 0.0.1 - July 1993
• ...
• 0.9.0 - 25 Oct 2005
• ...
• 0.9.58 - 21 March 2008
• 0.9.59 - 4 April 2008
• 0.9.60 - 18 April 2008
• 0.9.61 - 2 May 2008 - start of code freeze for 1.0
• 1.0.0-rc1 - 9 May 2008 (early because of Alexandre's vacation)
• No release 16 May (Alexandre on vacation)
• 1.0.0-rc2 - 23 May (early because of Alexandre's vacation)

The exact date of the 1.0.0 release can't be predicted; we'll keep on doing release candidates until we're comfortable with it. We expect it will be in June.

Will we have a code freeze before 1.0?

Yes. From the time we release 1.0.0.rc1, until we release 1.0.0, only small obvious fixes will be accepted. Other changes will be deferred to 1.1.0. This will reduce the chance of regressions in key applications.

When will Wine 1.0.0 be released?

Alexandre stated back in October 2007 that he knew of no 1.0 release blockers even then, and suggested we pick Wine's 15th anniversary for the actual date. Depending on how you look at it, there are several possible birthdays for Wine, mainly:

• 30 May 1993 - Jocke Berglund suggests that being "able to run windows programs without windows" would be a "great feature"

• 31 May 1993 - Garrett D'Amore: "I think it is technically feasible to write an 'interpreter' for Windows *.EXEs that calls its own internal functions whenever a specific call to certain API addresses are made"

• 8 Jul 1993 - the first Wine ChangeLog entry

Given that the exact birthday is a bit fuzzy, we'll simply continue with our normal biweekly release dats. That puts the 1.0 release at June 6th if it's ready by then, or June 20th or July 4th if it's not.

To give the 1.0 release some concrete meaning, we have chosen a few key apps (see WineReleaseCriteria; in particular, Photoshop CS2) that should run well with Wine 1.0. Those apps all run reasonably well now. The only thing that could stop the 1.0.0 release are regressions in those key apps.

Why are only four apps listed as release criteria?

Users are encouraged to test their favorite apps with the release candidate builds and report any problems they find, regardless of whether their apps are on the list of release criteria. If the fix is easy, we'll try to do it.

The app db lists 1227 platinum applications, so it may seem disappointing that WineReleaseCriteria only lists four applications as "must run well". The problem with expanding that list is that each new app adds a huge amount of testing to each release.

If you can provide an automated test case for your favorite platinum app, so that we can just run it without any manual work, we can add it to the list. Just post a link to your automated test script to wine-devel. One possibility is to adapt existing automated installer scripts such as the ones at http://wpkg.org/ or http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

On Branching

There are no plans to branch at the 1.0.0 release. Wine development is very rapid, and nobody likes running old versions; we anticipate that any 1.0 branch would see little use.

Nevertheless, the first development release after 1.0.0 will be called 1.1.0. This will allow us to create a stable 1.0.0 branch and release minor updates 1.0.1, etc. if desired.

Press Mentions

OK, this one made me smile:

• "Linux Users Ready to Toast Wine", PC World, Feb 2002