LWN Timeline for 2008: Wine 1.0 made it!

[Hin-Tak Leung]

--- On Thu, 22/1/09, Brian Vincent <brian.vincent at gmail.com> wrote:
<snipped>
> LWN is definitely receptive to any articles.  Things that
> come to mind
> would be an article describing Wine being used to get a
> specific
> Windows program to run.  For example, how you could use
> Wine to make
> iTunes run (not sure if iTunes is actually working these
> days.)
> Another idea might be someone describing a backend
> development process
> used to make Wine do something neat.  Like a technical
> description of
> what CodeWeavers did to get Chrome to run, or what Google
> has done to
> make the new version of Picasa work, etc.

I used to use wine just to run a few windows programs which has no linux equivalents, but lately it is for the late/testing stage of software development. Most R (http://www.r-project.org) developers are unix-oriented and user windows-oriented, and windows R packages (and R itself) can be either cross-compiled or native-built with mingw. I co-wrote an R package which was getting quite popular, and there were a fair amount of interests to get it to run on windows.

These days I cross-compile it - the process requires both native-linux R and win32 R libraries , you run native-linux R's package build script with mingw-cross gcc to link against win32 R's libraries (under wine) - and if I need to test, I install the cross-compiled package onto win32 R under wine. I don't touch windows, and the R package simply would not be ported over nor actively maintained for windows, if I don't have wine.

For that I contributed some changes to wine around mshtml, etc a while ago, to make win32 R's built-in documentation viewer work properly.

(I am almost pitching an article, it sounds like...)