WINE fork and Win32api implementation

[Steven Edwards]

Hola Everyone,

I'm CC'ing this to wine-devel so all of the WINE devs know whats going on as they have been very
nice and supporting of my work so far.

As everyone knows I've been doing a lot of work with Casper, James and Jurgan on the WINE fork to
windows. I've had a lot of luck and been learning alot along the way but I dont think I can
contribute much more the WINE porting work at this point from the ReactOS side. As David, Eugene
and Jason are makeing lots of progress on the Windowing are just a few days/weeks(?) away from
having Winhello working with the new Region code, I think someone needs to take over merging and
maintaining the WINE dlls. I talked to Jason about it today and we thought that Robert might want
to take over for a while if he is interested because he seems to like doing a lot of the Win32
side of things. If he is not interested does anyone else want to do it? 

IMHO the "right" way to fork the WINE code to best suite both projects is going to have to work
like this:

1. We make a set policy of when to merge. I know Jason was wanting to change the release cycle
times so the merging should be cordinated with that. Mabey like 2 weeks before a new release?

2. Whoever wants to try and maintain the fork is going to need to work with Capser on keeping the
w32api headers up to date. I have submitted a few minor patches but I dont have the time to do the
work that is really needed. This has been one of the biggest problems so far. Having 3 sets of
headers is just a pain and all of the projects seem interested in moving to one common include
system. I did a little bit of work trying to get some of the WINE dlls to compile with only the
mingw headers but I didnt have the time to do to much with it.

3. Keep from forking/redunancy as much as possible. It bothers me when as small as our projects
are we have already manged to have so much forking in WINE, mingw and ReactOS. How many registry
editors do we need? How many filemanamgers? Once again the header thing bothers me. Sorry I'm
ranting.

Anyways, as things move along it should get better as we will be able to share the headers,
programs, and librarys with WINE and Mingw. As of right now though I dont know how much more I can
do with my limited skill. So who wants to do it? In another few weeks/month we are going to need
to to try and get WINEmine, notepad and win/winefile working and import shell32, comctl32 and
comdlg32. 

I'm going to keep submitting patches to the winehq.com tree as I find fun and interesting stuff. I
still want to work toward having a drop in replacement with the "bleeding edge". My hope is that
ReactOS will one day work off of the stable wine 1.0 if it is ever released =) and people that
want the cutting edge can build wine 1.x dlls/programs for a ReactOS system. Most of my work from
now on though is going to focus documentation, testing and spreeding the word about OpenSource,
ReactOS, Wine and Mingw.

Thanks
Steven


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