Were these tests supposed to signal regressions? And were these tests somehow not needed for 9x/3.x, or were they needed but broken? As a simple Wine user I'm still confused about why this won't impact Win9x/3.x applications.
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I'm not involved in any way so this is just a guess, but I think that the same functions were behaving slightly differently in NT varients than 9x varients and that therefore for the tests to pass in both NT and 9x varients they would have to be more lenient than if they were to target just the one line. If this is true, then with unlimited resources they could keep a seperate series of tests for 9X which is tested with Wine set to the particular windows versions, but they probably don't have the time/manpower for that.Quote:
Were these tests supposed to signal regressions? And were these tests somehow not needed for 9x/3.x, or were they needed but broken? As a simple Wine user I'm still confused about why this won't impact Win9x/3.x applications.
There are regression tests, yes. The issue is on one side that Win9x is missing lots of things that are present on later versions. For example, Win9x has practically no support for Unicode, so if you wanted to test something you'd either have to restrict the tests to using non-Unicode functions only, or skipping the tests on Win9x. On the other hand, a lot of the things that are implemented in Win9x are just quirky or crash for no good reason, so you'd have to either avoid calling those as well, or make the tests less strict to accept the additional behaviour. Wine itself still needs to conform to the more strict behaviour, since there are plenty of applications that depend on 2000 or XP behaviour by now. And since most Win9x applications still run on e.g. XP or Win7 as well, having the tests run on Win9x doesn't add a whole lot.
Please note that running tests in Wine set to emulate Win95 is still supporter, it is only the ability to run the test suite on actual Win95 that are removed.
Wine set to Win95 compatibility mode still support most functions introduced in later versions of Windows (such as Unicode), and excising functions that crashed on some input in Win95 but works on later versions of Windows will still work in Wine set to Win95. Only when an excising function changed working behaviour in a later Windows versions does Wine change it's behaviour based on compatibility mode. Such functions can still be tested with the test suite, but the tests may now use other functionality introduced/fixed in later versions of Windows, and will thus fail on real Win95.
This makes verifying bug-for-bug-compatibility with Win95 harder, but makes maintaining the test suite easier, likely a worthwhile trade off.
Also note that the test suite has never been able to run on Win 3.1, but win16 test can be run on WoW (Windows on Windows), the win16 compatibility layer in 32bit versions of Windows. That is still supported, but win16 tests are, as far as I can tell, all but nonexisting.