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Corel Puts Internal WINE on CVS
I'm pretty pleased to see this one: Corel has put their internal CVS tree up for read only access so that they can more easily sync their
code with the official branches. You can see more at the
Corel Open Source Web site.
Corel is NOT forking Wine!
- Their tree is a whopping 6 weeks out of sync with WineHQ's. There was last a sync on December 12, 1999 (coinciding with the Wine 991212 release). All their work prior to that date that the Wine developers would accept is in WineHQ's tree already.
- The reason they maintain a separate tree for the moment is that they are beta testing and finalling their apps and need a stable tree (WineHQ's is being updated near-daily, in sometimes architecturally major ways, and certainly doesn't fit that definition).
- There are already patches pending at WineHQ that bring in the 2 interesting items in their tree that are not in WineHQ's (system tray bugfixes and partial WinInet/URLMon DLL implementations). Conversely, there are some features in WineHQ's tree since 991212 that aren't in Corel's, particularly for multimedia.
- Please note that their list of what they've done for Wine on that page represents ALL their work, and is not the differences between their tree and WineHQ. 99.6% of their work is in the WineHQ tree right now.
- There are a few items in their tree that won't ever be merged into WineHQ because Alexandre Julliard (Wine's "Linus") doesn't like them. This primarily includes the KDE look and feel patches.
Please, if you don't understand what's going on, don't make things up. If you must flame someone, head over to ZDNet and check out "Coop"'s hatchet job on Linus, LiViD, and the DVD fiasco...
-Ian Schmidt
wine-devel, in the AUTHORS file, and damn proud of it.
There are 2 parts to Wine: The Wine program loader the most of us have tried at one time or another, and winelib. Applications compiled with Winelib *ARE* native Linux apps, they just use Winelib as thier widget set instead of using something like GTK or QT. Programs compiled with Winelib should run as fast as any other Linux apps.
Corel has stated that their main interest in Wine is in using Winelib to allow their apps to be compiled for either Win32 or Linux/Wine with just a re-compile.
So yes, they are using Wine as a "backend" for thier Linux apps. But they are *native* Linux apps, and should have all of the speed and stability that Corel apps have (or don't have, as the case may be) on any other platform.