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.
Quoting: benjamimgoisSaddly this is not new in the opensource realm. Duplicated efforts due to Gigantic egos always generate duplicated / triplicated efforts. This is the same old DEB x RPM, KDE x Gnome, upstart x systemv , Snap x Flatpak.... While opensource is fighting it self, closed source OS like Windows and OSX concentrate efforts in what really matter.
I take it you've never worked inside a large company. Duplication, pet projects galore. And corporate politics gets involved, and even so, gigantic egos too. At least in /traditional/ open source development, you can actually compete openly on technical grounds. In companies, it's possible to cover up ineptitude. So it's not a problem really about being open source as it is simply mismanagement.
TheRiddick Jan 25, 2019
Last edited by TheRiddick on 25 January 2019 at 8:47 pm UTC
TheRiddick Jan 25, 2019
It is a open source project btw, not sure what exactly the wine devs were expecting, a rolled out red carpet? Just fcken do it! if they think they can improve something.
Quoting: liamdaweThis is a very one-sided argument right now and we really have no idea what is actually going on, we have the words of one person.Frankly, I have to question why you published this article given those very same arguments.
Did you try reaching out to Philip for comment?
TheRiddick Jan 25, 2019
Quoting: Guest...do you expect wine devs to roll out a red carpet instead?
I don't think Philip was trying to make contact :)
Last edited by TheRiddick on 25 January 2019 at 9:44 pm UTC
Quoting: SalvatosWe are a news site.Quoting: liamdaweThis is a very one-sided argument right now and we really have no idea what is actually going on, we have the words of one person.Frankly, I have to question why you published this article given those very same arguments.
Did you try reaching out to Philip for comment?
We publish news and interesting happenings about major projects.
It's not difficult to understand why. Many people have wondered ever since DXVK was created, if it would become part of Wine and this is some kind of insight into the happenings from one side.
Edit: And yes, I did try to speak to him first and he stayed out of it.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 25 January 2019 at 11:04 pm UTC
Quoting: GuestI wish that's all it was, the wording was very harsh though.Quoting: TheRiddickQuoting: Guest...do you expect wine devs to roll out a red carpet instead?
I don't think Philip was trying to make contact :)
Indeed, it was wine devs who wanted to talk about converging their efforts (not just merging dxvk, if I understand correctly). No response, and....that's all the news there is.
I think that's really all Henri was trying to say that as a statement, nothing more, as an explanation of where things are with regards to wine and dxvk. That's how I read it anyway. There was no mention of any expectations.
Whole thing is being stirred up over essentially nothing. But, the Internet I guess.
Quoting: SalvatosQuoting: liamdaweThis is a very one-sided argument right now and we really have no idea what is actually going on, we have the words of one person.Frankly, I have to question why you published this article given those very same arguments.
Did you try reaching out to Philip for comment?
What makes you think he'd respond even if Liam had? He clearly doesn't check his email. :P
Avehicle7887 Jan 25, 2019
There's no need to put pressure. I don't claim to know Philip, but if you look at his github he's very often responding to issues and helping people and that says enough for me.
I for one am grateful for all the work he's done and wish to see DXVK getting better, regardless if it's part of upstream Wine or as a separate addon.
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