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.
I think it would be incredible to have a VisualStudio plugin that would allow developers to target the Wine API and at least indicate if a particular API will not be supported under it. That way it makes the API less of a moving target in that it establishes WINE as the authoritative API for development of Windows applications that will work across platforms. Once people recognize that Windows is not the way forward they will appreciate having their options open.
How will Vista affect this beta release?
You know, starting about next year, WINE will suddenly find a new big customer base, provided they can abstract the design enough to run on OSX-x86. I'm not sure how much work that would take but it certainly seems worth doing. I imagine that the people on OSX with an urge to run Windows apps will outnumber users of Linux with the same urge. Hell, if I were Codeweavers, I'd be working really hard on CrossoverOSX. There might even be good money in it!
Could it be that the hardware improvements made over the last 12 years may have made library-level emulation unnecessary? Device-level (eg, vmware) and architecture-level (eg, virtual pc) are both simpler and more robust.
In case anyone doesn't know. The ReactOS project works closely with WINE. They are implementing the API from WINE on a replica of the Windows 2000 kernel.
This means that both Windows drivers and applications will work natively without any changes. They seem to have come on leaps and bounds in the past year with many applications working straight away (OpenOffice, Abiword, mIRC, Unreal Tournament, InfranView, PuTTY as some). Once they start implementing some of the security features then there will be another viable alternative.
In the future I can imagine ReactOS coming on a CD with OpenOffice, Apache etc, much like Linux distributions do, which creates an easy migration path:
Windows + Apps -> Windows + OSS Apps -> ReactOS + OSS Apps then then off to a Linux or *BSD varient if you want.