Fwd: WWN 353

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Mon Oct 13 21:16:40 CDT 2008


On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Zachary Goldberg wrote:
[...]
> > There were specific BSD builds of crossover posted sometime back 
> > after much demand and Codeweavers saw very very little response. As 
> > a result not much effort has been put into the area.

That sentence is clearly missing a '... by CodeWeavers'.

Because, this being a largely free world, CodeWeavers has no control on 
what the other Wine developpers do (or what CodeWeavers employees do on 
their free time, e.g. Alexandre helped fix some issues in the FreeBSD 
kernel).


[...]
> I don't know why the BSD experience with CrossOver has to have any bearing
> on OS X and Solaris support for Wine.
[...]

As said above, it has no _direct_ bearing. But see below.


> For Solaris, Wine just started working for me with 1.1.3 (there were 3 
> Solaris patches in that release).

I'm glad you're happy with CodeWeavers' work :-) CodeWeavers got a real 
demand to get Wine working on Solaris (as strange as that may seem) so 
we've been able to devote some resources to it. The patches you see in 
1.1.3 (and some older and newer releases) are a result of this. That's 
how CrossOver demand for a platform has a bearing on Wine development: 
if we have clear demand for it we can devote resources, and since we 
push all our work straight back to Wine, Wine immediately benefits.


> Maybe I'm wrong.  But, if I'm wrong, then that doesn't mean that I 
> don't want my platforms supported.

But that's the issue. These platforms will only be well supported if 
some of _their_ developers get interested in Wine and actually 
contribute to it. Currently I don't see that happening in any 
significant way. Every day people pop up on wine-devel or wine-patches 
submitting patches to make their Windows application work better in 
Wine... on Linux. But we rarely if ever see Solaris or FreeBSD 
developers pop up like that.

Why, I don't know. Maybe it's just the 'market share' and if so that 
would be sad. Maybe it's because up until recently Wine sucked on these 
platforms and improving it involved hard, highly technical, discouraging 
issues. But now these issues are gone (or so I'm told), so maybe we just 
need people to try again. If so, then there hope: it's just a matter of 
getting the word out. Here's a try:

   Wine should work fine on FreeBSD 7.0 or greater.
   So if you're a FreeBSD developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!
   (note, you really want >= 7.0 here)

   Wine should work fine on Solaris 10u3 or greater.
   So if you're a Solaris developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!

(insert famous poster here and there)

And if it does not work, debug it, figure out why, ONLY YOU CAN DO THAT. 
Normally you should not hit big discouraging blockers anymore, just the 
usual missing functionality here and there.

So if getting the word out is the issue, then hopefully Zach's article 
will help. Beyond that I'm not sure what to do. WineHQ already has 
FreeBSD and Solaris packages (the Solaris ones are slightly out of date 
actually). Maybe putting an announcement on the WineHQ front page could 
help too? But we may need a wider reach...


-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at free.fr>              http://fgouget.free.fr/
  Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment
                               -- Barry LePatner



More information about the wine-devel mailing list