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

[Mike Hearn]

> If you ask me, we should look to implement the (undocumented?) XP skinning 
> API's -- with a deliberite sprinkling of internal extensions to clean up some 
> of the messy parts if they are too slow for "built in" wine skins.

I think they are fairly well documented from looking at them a few
months ago.

> It's probably not /that/ difficult to figure out, especially if one is armed 
> with something like WindowBlinds to hack on.  After all, they figured it out 
> at StarDock, (although they might have the "top secret" special sauce from MS 
> for all I know...) and some of it is probably out there on the net.

WindowBlinds uses extensive hooking from what I recall - it made Windows
(98) rather unstable. XP theming is different, it's actually built into
the common controls library.

> Once you have a skinning API, you just implement a 'gnome compat' and 'kde 
> compat' skin (or even just an automagical one that does both) the thing would 
> "just work", right?  Why, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours ;)  
> (WARNING: that last part was a joke, if you set your watch by this you very 
> well may miss work for several years).

I don't think we could do KDE skins, as (surprise) they depend on Qt
which is GPLd. Most projects out there (mozilla, openoffice) use GTK
theming engines.

> Might be harder than some other approach to this problem, but IMO it would be 
> a waste to expend labor building "skins" into wine using some other 
> architecture which might be non-orthagonal to that used by MS operating 
> systems.
-- 
Mike Hearn <m.hearn at signal.qinetiq.com>
QinetiQ - Malvern Technology Center