GSoC

[James Hawkins]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 5:48 PM, Maarten Lankhorst
<m.b.lankhorst at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Austin,
>
>  2008/3/14, Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>:
>
>
> > On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Maarten Lankhorst
>  >  <m.b.lankhorst at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  > Hi all,
>  >  >
>  >  >  2008/3/13, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org>:
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  > > Christopher Harvey wrote:
>  >  >  >  > I've had a few ideas that I thought of on my own, but now I'm starting
>  >  >  >  > to see they perhaps aren't as useful as the ideas thought of by current
>  >  >  >  > developers, but I'll float it out there one last time. I thought it
>  >  >  >  > would be cool to create a wine GUI overlay for games, exactly like
>  >  >  >  > nvPerfHUD. The thing about doing it in wine that makes it better than
>  >  >  >  > nvPerHUD is the fact the to use nvPerfHUD the apps have to give
>  >  >  >  > permission for nvPerHUD to run on them. A wine version would actually be
>  >  >  >  > able to force every single 3d app, opengl or directX to output nvPerfHUD
>  >  >  >  > like output. Anyway, just a thought. Would I be able to apply for both
>  >  >  >  > of these projects and pick one last minute?
>  >  >  >  > Thanks,
>  >  >  >  > Chris.
>  >  >  >  >
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  > After talking about the concept a bit at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, I
>  >  >  >  really don't like the idea of a "Wine GUI" just for running Wine
>  >  >  >  applications.  From the user's persepctive, installers for Wine
>  >  >  >  applications shouldn't be substantially different from any old Linux
>  >  >  >  installer - they just click on them, it adds something to their
>  >  >  >  applications menu, and from then on they can run it from there.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  Most of the futzing with applications, like messing around with native
>  >  >  >  dlls in winecfg, shouldn't have to be done at all.  The same goes with
>  >  >  >  editing the registry.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  Configuration we'll never be able to eliminate completely, like
>  >  >  >  selecting the windows version, should ultimately be done through an
>  >  >  >  intuitive place and not some central "Wine configuration" program.  For
>  >  >  >  instance, I should be able to right click a Windows application, select
>  >  >  >  properties, and then change the Windows version from there.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  >  So, yes, I agree.  Winecfg is ugly and inadequate for the kind of
>  >  >  >  configuration our users are doing now.  But before we put too much
>  >  >  >  effort into sprucing up Winecfg, let's instead talk about how feasible
>  >  >  >  it is to make it unneeded in the first place.
>  >  >
>  >  >  I totally agree that a wine gui is not what we want. ui's are counter
>  >  >  productive.
>  >  >  I also found that I need winecfg less and less, I now run winecfg only
>  >  >  to set the windows version to vista. Maybe we should make this version
>  >  >  the default now? More and more applications don't want to run with
>  >  >  windows version set to 2000, and it should just work.
>  >  >
>  >  >  Cheers,
>  >  >  Maarten.
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >
>  >
>  > There was a discussion a while back about setting the default version
>  >  to XP. Vista may be a bad default, considering how badly it's been
>  >  running, I wouldn't be surprised if some apps start including their
>  >  own workarounds for Vista.
>  It's a good idea to set to vista, I think we'll support it. Some games
>  for example won't run on xp any more.
>
>  I only know apps that will run if windows version is set to vista. I
>  don't know any that fail if the version is set to that specifically.
>

We should set the default version to the version of Windows that we
emulate the best.  This is determined in part by what version the
tests are written for (and thus the implementation is aligned with).
As can be seen from the test results, the version with the fewest
failures is XP or 2003.  Thus, we should set our default version to
winxp.  Though you say many games don't run on XP anymore, Vista
hasn't been around long enough for us to emulate that version
correctly.  Besides, 'games' is just a subset of the applications
people run in Wine.  Defaulting to Vista is overreaching our bounds
and will lead to many problems.

-- 
James Hawkins