Wine, WIDE & Unix (was: Support for pkgconfig)

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On 25 Apr 2003, Mike Hearn wrote:

> Actually.... yes? :) They aren't really diverging in my eyes, this
> broken system tray I have sitting here taunting me is a visible reminder
> that we need to keep Wine up to date with the latest standards.

Yes, they become better integrated, but we're at the beginning of the
road, and we still don't even get the easy stuff perfect: L&F, system 
tray, etc. I can see unifying most settings so we don't have to configure
things twice, but we're far away, there seems to be little political
will (especially on the KDE side). But what about OLE? KDE will never
accept CORBA (for good reasons), while GNOME will not drop it.
That's the big one: how do you integrate the apps more than making
them just look the same?

> I'm still not sure why you think we need one implementation to get
> integration, as opposed to one set of interfaces with several possible
> implementations. 

It's mainly a misunderstanding, mea culpa. I am not suggesting the 
"one implementation" is the way to go, but it's a possiblity. I actually
think a set of interfaces with different implementations is better in the
long run, so I'm happy we have things like the freestandards.org, and 
Havoc seems to be doing a great job.

For WIDE, I would not reinvent everything around Win32, as the 
GNOME/KDE/OpenStep/Enlightment people did around their toolkits.
I would get the best of breed apps from all environments, and
try to integrate them:
   -- For L&F, having Wine adapt the L&F of the native environment 
      is better, if that would be available, I'd use it. If not, I 
      might compile GTK-Wimp agains Wine, until we get theaming in 
      Wine.
   -- There are a bunch of free Win32 apps on SF which are very
      popular. I can choose some of those, like eMule, Mozilla/Win32,
      etc. I may use the ReactOS Explorer replacement instead of
      Nautilus, if they do a good job with it.
   -- I would compile wxWindows against it's Wine backend, simply
      because I think out widgets are better than the ones in GTK.
   -- I will try to have a Bonobo backend for Win32, so that
      GNOME apps could seemlessly link and embed Win32 apps.
   -- All libs in WIDE will be LGPL, so the platform is free for
      everybody.

I was not suggesting to replace read with ReadFile, or Unix
pipes with Win32 pipes. Yes, about the same thing one can
achieve on top of GNOME, by just tweaking Wine to integrate
better with it. But the big problem with GNOME is political,
people are too religious about these issues.

All I want is a higly integrated environment where I get by
default 'best of breed' free apps from across GNOME/Windows/etc.
As a user I don't care what langauge/api/toolkit an app uses,
I want an unified seemless environment. I'm sick and tired
of all the political debates, give me a cool user experience,
not political diatribes on why I should belive religiously that
Windows sucks and $YOUR_DESKTOP_ENVIRONMENT is the best thing
since slice bread.

-- 
Dimi.