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No WINE Before Its Time

Posted by Zonk on from the uncork-that-sucker dept.

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.

9 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. More info.. by jkind · · Score: 5, Informative

    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~
  2. Great Wine Quote by xactuary · · Score: 5, Funny
    The post reminded me of an old wine quote which I've used quite often... Just take a sip and say, "A naive domestic with little breeding, but I'm amused by its presumption."

    Cheers.

    --
    Say hello to my little sig.
  3. VisualStudio Plugin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. vista by CDPatten · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How will Vista affect this beta release?

  5. Wine for OSX by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  6. Obsolete model? by Slashdiddly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Good clone by Baramin · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.


    That's what I get from WinXP on a regular basis, so I guess I could stand using Wine.
    --
    There's no place like 127.0.0.1
    MyBlog
  8. ReactOS and WINE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:Not as hard as quote suggests by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.