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Some information on why Wine is not going to be using DXVK

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It seems things aren't all rosy between CodeWeavers and DXVK, as developer Henri Verbeet has written into the Wine Development mailing list to give more details.

The developers working on Wine seem to be going their own way with their Vulkan plans and most thought this was due to DXVK being written in C++, a different license and so on. Apparently, that's not the main issue as Verbeet notes and they didn't pull any punches:

In February 2018, we reached out to Philip Rebohle—the author of DXVK—to start a conversation around whether there were any areas we could cooperate on. One obvious area was the vkd3d shader compiler, which translates Direct3D shader byte code to SPIR-V (much like DXVK has to do), but there would have been other possibilities, like sharing the DXGI implementation, or using a scheme like vkd3d where Wine's d3d11 could have optionally loaded DXVK as a regular shared library. That e-mail went unanswered. Now, I appreciate that different people have different ideas about what's acceptable and what isn't, but personally I think that's extremely rude and uncivilised.

They continued:

Nevertheless, e-mail gets lost sometimes, sometimes people are busy, everyone gets a second chance. So a few months later, since I was organising WineConf 2018, I sent Philip a personal invitation to attend WineConf, and perhaps discuss things there. That invitation went unanswered too, at which point I was pretty much done with DXVK.

It is my understanding that since then both Jeremy White and CodeWeavers' partners at Valve have tried reaching out to Philip on the subject, but evidently with little success.

Personally, this all feels like it's getting a little too heated for me. Still, it shows that there's clearly some communication issues that need to be solved between all parties involved for the better of us all who use Wine, DXVK and so on.

Hopefully the situation can be resolved in an amicable way, calling someone out in such a way doesn't seem particularly fair though. I've picked up on emails months after they were sent before, it's very common when you're busy and working alone. I did speak to Philip Rebohle after this, who said they would rather stay out of "unnecessary drama in public".

The good news, is that they are working on an official wined3d Vulkan backend going by a codename of Damavand which will be interesting to see.

You can see the mailing list entry here.

Cheers, Phoronix.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Vulkan, Wine
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Liam Dawe Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: PatolaSo the guy sent two emails without answer and concluded it was rudeness? I don't know about you guys but I miss personal emails all the time. Same with telegram and whatsapp instant messages.
I have emails that end up going unanswered for weeks and sometimes completely forgotten about until a year later because I am so busy, it's just how it is.
Naib Jan 25, 2019
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*sigh* Appeal to community is bad form.

Could DXVK dev have emailed back some response? sure but if they are deep in code, hitting deadlines, have other priorities it is EXTREMELY easy for such a query to drop out of scope.

Also the DXVK dev probably has other priorities that are ahead of interaction with another project
lucinos Jan 25, 2019
I am quite sure if we check the projects that have been forked, number one reason is "someone does not answer his emails"
dpanter Jan 25, 2019
Does he... does he have the correct e-mail address? :S:

Maybe I should start selling those Jump-To-Conclusions mats to everyone on Twitter.

Liam Dawe Jan 25, 2019
A confusing situation to be sure, since Valve are supposed to be working in co-operation with CodeWeavers, with DXVK contracted by Valve.
pb Jan 25, 2019
That reminds me of a huge business deal that I would have missed if I didn't peek in my spam folder for no reason. After that I set a reminder to check/clean my spam box every two weeks. ;-)
Nevertheless Jan 25, 2019
Codeweavers works with Valve on Proton, Valve funds DXVK for Proton, and Codeweavers and DXVK are unable to communicate with each other? Sounds odd to me.
Maybe the story has an unknown background. However, I don't see how the community could possibly help...
Liam Dawe Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: pbThat reminds me of a huge business deal that I would have missed if I didn't peek in my spam folder for no reason. After that I set a reminder to check/clean my spam box every two weeks. ;-)
Was it the FBI offering billions of dollars? ;)
Nevertheless Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: pbThat reminds me of a huge business deal that I would have missed if I didn't peek in my spam folder for no reason. After that I set a reminder to check/clean my spam box every two weeks. ;-)
Was it the FBI offering billions of dollars? ;)

No, that Nigerian deal!
chepati Jan 25, 2019
It's weird that we have to remind people in 2019 how email works. There is no guarantee that an email ever gets sent, much less received and even less that it gets seen and/or replied. There are too many hoops that an email has to jump through before it reaches its intended recipient.

Giving up on a correspondence and a partnership of this importance on the basis of two (or a few) unanswered emails is beyond childish and unprofessional.

If the guy had replied and been rude, then that's a different matter, but that is not the case.

What the CodeWeaver guy did, airing his grievances in this public manner, will on the other hand create tension and may jeopardize any future cooperation between the two projects.

Also, how about forking dxvk if its author is MIA? If people ask why the fork, then they can go public and explain that they reached out to the guy but did not receive an answer so they had to go that route. But they chose to insult first.

Bad etiquette. But not the end of the world.
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