No WINE Before Its Time

Joe Barr writes "Stephen Feller has a story about WINE on NewsForge this morning ahead of next week's expected Beta release. The WINE project is 12 years old, so it's just about time." From the article: "'Wine has historically had a very frustrating history because it has been alpha software,' White said. 'This is really hard work. We're replicating the work of a billion-dollar company. The reason we're saying it's alpha is because we believe we still have fundamental changes to make on the way the internals work.' Noting that it has not always been easy to install software with Wine's alpha releases over the last decade, White said that once you got something working it has never meant it would continue to do so, or do so properly. There may have been display glitches or things not functioning properly, if a program even worked with Wine at all." OSTG is the parent company of both Slashdot and NewsForge.

Comments

More info..

[jkind]

LWN.NET has a good rundown of new features, including Direct X 9 support and a new RichEdit control :)
http://lwn.net/Articles/154451/

Re:VisualStudio Plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

Winelib.

Re:Wine for OSX

[pwagland]

Hell, if I were Codeweavers, I'd be working really hard on CrossoverOSX. There might even be good money in it!

http://www.codeweavers.com/about/general/press/?id =20050622

It would appear that you are not alone...

Re:ABRs of OSS

[AlbertEin]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage

Alpha: The alpha version of a product still awaits full debugging or full implementation of all its functionality, but satisfies a majority of the requirements. It often lacks features promised in the final release, but demonstrates the feasibility and basic structure of the software

Beta: A beta version or beta release usually represents the first feature complete version of a computer program or other product, likely to be unstable but useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers. Some developers refer to this stage as a preview, as a technical preview (TP) or as an early access. Often this stage begins when the developers announce a feature freeze on the product, indicating that no more features will be added to this version of the product and only software issues, or bugs, will be removed. Beta versions stand at an intermediate step in the full development cycle. Developers release them to a group of beta testers (sometimes the general public) for a user test. The testers report any bugs that they found and sometimes minor features they would like to see in the final version.

Alpha does mean lack of quality and features, it does mean that it could change a lot.

Beta doesn't mean that some code or binaries are released, that could apply to non open source software, but in OSS it's out of place. The beta stuff is about make something stabler, frozing the features, like a snapshot of the final release.

Re:ReactOS and WINE

[TwoTailedFox]

Replica? Almost. ReactOS is designed to be compatible, first-off, with Windows NT 4.0.

Networking is the next big leap for the 0.3.0 ReactOS Release. Some parts work quite well already.

Re:Not as hard as quote suggests

[IamTheRealMike]

It's not quite that simple I'm afraid.

Take the recent DCOM work we did. This is what I'm going to talk about because it's what I know - myself (CW) and Rob Shearman (CW), along with some help from Marcus Meissner (Novell) and Huw Davies (CW) reimplemented large parts of DCOM mostly for one application. The work took many months - starting from a pre-existing codebase written by Marcus years earlier, we were "finished" ~135 patches later.

What was that one application which was so important?

InstallShield.

Now perhaps you see the problem - sure, not every API is used by every app. But there are hundreds of thousands of APIs, many extremely complex, and many millions of applications. All it takes is ONE popular application to use a single API that was not yet reimplemented and you have months of work ahead of you.

This is especially true of something like DCOM where the supporting infrastructure for 4 or 5 functions can run to 10,000+ lines of code.

Re:Welld duh its written in C

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you, twelve? Because you're obviously not a C programmer, nor have you any idea how any of this stuff works. This much is clear from your post.

Quit making shit up. Seriously.

Gtk+ and by extension Gnome is object oriented and always have been. So are parts of Win32. Both use C, not C++. It is very possible to do object orientation in C. The earliest C++ compilers took C++ code and turned it into C, then passed it into a C compiler. It would still be possible to do a modern C++ compiler this way, because C++ doesn't do anything fancy that can't be expressed in C.

Templates? Use #define or possibly some other trick. Namespaces? Put extra namespace_ crap in your symbols. Classes? Use structs. Virtual methods? Put function pointers in the structs. Inheritance? Cast structs to other structs, or store different structs in object wrappers. These are just a few ideas. What you end up with may not have as nice syntax, but it still does everything that C++ can. It is done by Microsoft. It is done by Gnome. It's really no big deal.

I really hate it when people assume that object-oriented design depends 100% on the presence of a "class" keyword. To say that is narrow minded and shallow.

Re:Welld duh its written in C

[xquark]

Wasn't one of the first iterations of GCC's C++ to just simply convert the C++ syntax into C and then compile + link ?

Arash

Re:Obsolete model?

[CaraCalla]

You certainly have a point there.

But:

• Try running a graphic intensive application (eg. a game) inside VMWare.
• More generally, there will always be applications which require the latest and fastest hardware. In that case you do care about emulation overhead.
• You still need a Microsoft License.
• While in VMWare's case integration between native and emulated apps is pretty good (filesystem, clipboard), its not even close to being on par with Crossover Office and wine.
• Wine is not an emulator :-)

--
sig: no sig

One exists for PHP, so its not out of the question

[Richthofen80]

Visual Studio is pretty powerful, relatively speaking. There's a plugin for PHP, (http://www.jcxsoftware.com/) so it wouldn't be the first time an open source programming platform was used in a Visual studio plugin.

Also, in the new Visual studio HTML editor, there's a web standards dropdown so that the code will flag as errors if not part of the selected standard. The same dropdown could exist for Wine code. I'd use it.

Re:ReactOS and WINE

[TwoTailedFox]

Small Correction: It's 0.2.7, not 2.7.

ReactOS is still Alpha Software, and as such, is incorporating elements from later Windows NT iterations. Some Winsock 2 API's have already been implemented, that came in Windows XP. Even some Windows 2003 Functionality, like Guarded Mutex, is present.

0.2.7 shipped with a 2 major bugs that have been largely fixed (touch wood)... 0.2.8 is due out in a few weeks, with 0.2.8 RC1 already out on their Sourceforge Page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos).

Once it's got the NT4-esque layout, it's then easier to play catchup to the later versions.

Re:ReactOS and WINE

[LentoMan]

ReactOS homepage used to say they were aiming for nt4.0 compatibility, but now it says: "The ReactOS® project is dedicated to making Free Software available to everyone by providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows® XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface." I'm sure they will adopt to any updates microsoft does and eventually catch up...even if it will take a few (or lots) of years.

Re:Wine for OSX

[ultranova]

Wine: Whoah, something almost worked!

Wine used to work somewhat, back when all configuration was done with a config file, because then you could just copy-paste it from the Net. However, then some nincompoop decided to remove support for the text config in favor of graphical configuratio tool, which not only makes it harder to config things (since you can't just copy-paste config file from Net anymore), but apparently doesn't properly save little details like "is this drive the CD-ROM or hard drive", even if it lets you choose between them in the graphical interface.

Personally, I've pretty much given up on Wine. Nothing installs under it, nothing works properly, and when by some miracle you finally get something to both install and work, someone rips the functional parts of Wine code out because they happen to offend his sense of How Things Should Be.

And yes, I did use wineinstall, so the config should be set to a working default. Now if something, anything, would actually work with those default settings :(...

Do yourself a favor and stay away from Wine - as it is, it's just a waste of good diskspace.

Re:Welld duh its written in C

[ClosedSource]

"Gtk+ and by extension Gnome is object oriented and always have been. So are parts of Win32."

I don't know about Gtk+ and Gnome, but I believe Win32 is only object-oriented it the sense that your application can create display objects at run-time that are subclassed from standard Windows display objects. That's not the same as saying that the Win32 source code is C written in an object-oriented manner.

"It is very possible to do object orientation in C."

Yes, you can write object-oriented code in C or even assembly language, but the set of problems that are best solved using that approach are very small. The vast majority of C-only programs are not object-oriented and are probably better off that way.

"The earliest C++ compilers took C++ code and turned it into C, then passed it into a C compiler."

Yes, early C++ programs were compiled this way. The reason they went to all that trouble was because they believed that C was inadequate for solving large complex problems, not because they didn't believe an OO approach was possible in C.

Re:Welld duh its written in C

[Anonymous Coward]

Win32 is object oriented in that you pass abstract handles and pointers to various data structures into its various functions which will act slightly differently depending on the underlying implementation. This description is kind of vague, but what I'm trying to say is these methods are used all over the place in various pieces of Win32. It's not clean and it has a lot of cruft. But it's a form of OO in terms of how it gets implemented. Think about the Win32 HANDLE, even. Yes, it's a key to a kernel resident data structure but if you think about it, those data structures are also objects. A HANDLE can have any number of methods, some underlying implementations behind handles have different methods and inherit from others. That's all a form of OO; just not the kind of OO that everybody thinks of when they hear OO.

Yes, early C++ programs were compiled this way. The reason they went to all that trouble was because they believed that C was inadequate for solving large complex problems,

What? That's gibberish. What "large complex problems" are you talking about exactly? C expresses everything that C++ does, minus the clean syntax. It's still conceivable to write a C++-to-C converter. I would think that the reason the compilers moved away is that there's no point in implementing these features in an "intermediate language" when you can just go straight to the assembly level. If you think about turning C++ into C and then compiling that, that's obviously notthe most elegant way to do it.

Re:Welld duh its written in C

[Urusai]

Anything that can be done can be done in any Turing-complete language. So what? Putting objects in C is like emulating structured programming in Assembly--certainly doable, but what kind of idiot would you be? If you want modern paradigms, use languages that have them built in. This sort of excludes the hack that is C++, I admit...