Ask Jeremy White and Alexandre Julliard About the Future of WINE

Last week, after 15 years of development, tempered by the need for arduous reverse engineering, the WINE project released version 1.0. What "1.0" means for WINE is neither that the project is finished, nor that it is perfect, but rather that the software runs a small subset of specific freely downloadable Windows applications. That's not to say it doesn't run scads of others, too -- the apps database is proof that thousands of programs run to at least some degree. Here's your chance to ask WINE developer Jeremy White and WINE project lead Alexandre Julliard (both of Codeweavers) about the future of WINE, or any other questions about the project that cross your mind. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply; please ask as many questions as you'd like, but limit yourself to one question per post. We'll pass on the best questions to Jeremy and Alexandre for their answers.

Comments

No, wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

1.0 is used to mark the API as being stable: it is now safe to build your Windows' program's source code against the wine headers without having to worry about them changing in the future.

That a few of the important Windows applications work was a side goal: the wine developers merely thought that it would be fitting, given the apparent significance of the 1.0 release name, to perfect support for what they can.

Perhaps you're thinking of wine the wrong way. It is, first and foremost, a windows-compatible API for porting applications to posix.

Re:What about the small unique apps?

[David Gerard]

Bugs in such apps are valid and they work hard on fixing them where at all possible. In fact, almost all such apps work just fine.

What tends to happen is that a given area of Win32 is covered to the extent that all apps written with a tool that uses that area then work. So e.g. we're desperately waiting for .NET 2.0 to work properly in Wine.