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29 May 2000 00:00:00 -0800
by Eric Pouech
Issue: 45

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This is the 45th release of the Wine's kernel cousin publication. Its main goal is to distribute widely what's going on around Wine (the Un*x Windows emulator).

Wine 20000526 has been released. The main changes include:
  • New C preprocessor for the resource compiler
  • More built-in debugger improvements
  • OpenGL support
  • Many common controls fixes and merges from Corel tree
  • Lots of bug fixes.

This week, 128 posts consumed 317 K. There were 42 different contributors. 23 (54%) posted more than once. 26 (61%) posted last week too.

The top 5 posters of the week were:

  1. 17 posts in 33K by Alexandre Julliard
  2. 11 posts in 22K by Dmitry Timoshkov
  3. 9 posts in 20K by James Sutherland
  4. 7 posts in 11K by Dimitrie O. Paun
  5. 6 posts in 10K by Marcus Meissner

Improving error messages 21 May 2000 00:00:00 -0800 Archive

Andreas Mohr made a proposal to modify the Wine's debug messages macro (TRACE, ERR, FIXME, WARN) in order to make those messages more readable as well as more portable.

He proposed to:
  • move error messages text out of the code to a configuration file,
  • add more information to the error case (what should be done, a list of persons to contact...)
  • report a given error only once
  • localization of error messages could also be done

Lots of people disliked the proposal, firstly for code readability: Dimitrie O Paun liked to have, in the code, the content of the error message. Patrik Stridval didn't agree either: So I think that we must instead ask the question: "What methods should we use to find the existing bugs in Wine?" Trying to reduce the problem to "How should our error messages look like?" is not doable.

Some other liked the idea and proposed to (re)use some existing tools. Marcus Meissner pointed to gettext GNU tool which shall do part of the work. Dimitry Timoshkov remembered a Win32 API FormatMessage that provides part of the needed functionality (basically parameter positioning). As Francois Gouget noticed, when translating from one language to another have a parameter index change: the formating engine has to take care of it.

Anyway, everyone agreed that internationalization of error messages was not a top priority, and also that there was no need to change current internal macros, but only, in the few cases, to use FormatMessage to provide a much detailed (and configurable) error reporting mechanism.

James Sutherland disliked the idea of implementing this lookup functionality with a Win32 API. He'd better use a Unix only function, for portability issues, but also for better control on memory conditions for example.

But, most of the posters didn't follow James point of view and turned back his Unix only implementation.

As a conclusion, no more API will be available on that very subject. Developers can make use of FormatMessage to display nicer error messages. The only good news is that Bertho Stultiens started working on a Wine's message compiler. This tool creates the resource holding the messages table used by FormatMessage.

OpenGL requirements 23 May 2000 00:00:00 -0800 Archive

Uwe Bonnes asked what are the prerequisites to run OpenGL software with Wine. Lionel Ulmer gave the details: The requirements are easy, it's a Linux OpenGL ABI compliant OpenGL library ( http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/ABI/ ). To summarize, it provides :
  • include files gl.h, glx.h and glext.h
  • a libGL defining all OpenGL v1.2 + the multi-texture extension
  • a libGL defining the function used to query extensions (glXGetProcAddressARB).

The known compliant libraries are (I am sure) NVIDIA's OpenGL drivers and XFree 4.0's default drivers (dunno about the 3DFx DRI drivers included in XF4.0). I think that Mesa 3.3beta also includes everything that is needed.

After that, as ALL compliant libGLs are relying on libpthread (as thread safety is explicitly required by the ABI), you need to force inclusion of OpenGL (--enable-opengl) (Ed note: while configuring Wine ). This is known to work with glibc 2.1.3 and was failing with 2.0.6 (not tested recently).


Survey 05/29/2000

After almost ten months of existence (and the upcoming of Wine 1.0), we think it's time to get some feedback from you, reader of this news letter. One of its major drawback is that it only covers technical aspects and is geared towards techies and developers, not end users. We'll try to improve on this last part by providing two new types of articles will (hopefully on a weekly basis):
  • feature article : this type of article should cover one aspect of Wine (address space separation, printing, DirectDraw...) and give information on: current state, how it's implemented
  • report of success (or failure) : this type of article would report successful running of some application (and configuration twists when needed)

Any contribution on both types is welcomed (if you feel like a technical write, don't hesitate). If you also have some wishes for the feature articles, or have other suggestions for this news letter improvement, just let us now. All messages shall be sent to this e-mail address

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GNU General Public License, version 2.0.