Question: How are bug fixes prioritized?

[landersohn]

First of all, I think wine is a great software and I am using it pretty often.
My question is, how bug fixes are prioritized. I would think, bugs that affect software w/o any alternative in Linux should rank fairly high wheres bug fixes regarding software with perfectly working alternatives in Linux should rank fairly low. As an example, I usually cringe if I see a bug fix for notepad! Honestly, if anyone is so intent on using notepad under wine when there are boatloads of native linux alternatives is beyond me, why doesn't such a person stick with Windows in the first place?
There are several such examples (I would throw IE in this category as well ...).

It's painful to see that because MS Office for example is flaky at best, the workaround for the RichEdit control is unacceptable. And no, LibreOffice and OpenOffice are not suitable alternatives because because the support for for DOCX, XLSX, PPTX file formats is abysmal AND if one uses linux for work and needs to interact with the rest of the world, MS Office is (unfortunately) the de-facto standard.

[dimesio]

Wine is a volunteer project. Developers work on what they want, when they want, because for the most part they are doing it on their own time. The exception is Codeweavers, which does employ developers to work on its version of Wine, and does submit many of those improvements back into mainline Wine. Codeweavers sets its own priorities, presumably based on what its customers want, need, and are willing to pay for.

Regarding notepad, the bugfixes you see are usually for Wine's notepad, not Windows'. A notepad replacement is needed because some apps depend on it. The same is true for IE: it is there for html rendering.

As for Office and riched20, I have to disagree with you about the workaround being unacceptable. Wine only attempts to implement dlls that are shipped with Windows. The riched20 that is installed by Office 2007 and later is a custom version that only comes with Office, so Wine's riched20 cannot be expected to emulate features that only exist in that version. Setting an override so Wine uses the custom version rather than builtin is not difficult.

[landersohn]

Thanks for the explanation on riched20 and the prioritization. Didn't know about the customized riched20.

On the workaround, I'd agree if it was as easy to set the override, problem is it doesn't work for me out of the box w/o. Apparently I would have to install more 32 bit libs and that is where I am unhappy.

[dimesio]

32 bit libs are needed to run 32 bit apps. There is no way around this.

[landersohn]

Actually, I have to apologize, I am an idiot.
I tried the native override but on the wrong wine prefix
Jut installed 1.6, configured the correct prefix and it works just peachy.

Sorry.