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