16 months is a long development cycle for an open source project. Has the Wine project considered smaller, faster releases? I imagine they need a lot of test time to find subtle compatibility regressions because there are so many crappy Windows applications that depend on Windows quirks and misfeatures.
I'm not part of Wine, but it seems like their project is uniquely vulnerable to regressions. They not only need to write their software correctly, but they need to write their bugs correctly as well. Unfortunately, their is no good way to test for these regressions other than time.
Well, not exactly -- there's an enormous unit test suite, and most changes come with associated tests to prove correctness (tests, in turn, are deemed correct by automatically running them on a dozen different versions of windows).
Regressions still happen, of course -- we might not be testing the right thing, or we might hit an edge case where implementing something completely correctly caused an application to break that was secretly relying on one wine bug hiding another wine bug.
