why is Kronenberg's Wine/Mac work blacklisted on winehq?

Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com
Thu Jun 25 08:56:29 CDT 2009


Hi,

Yesterday I edited http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs to be much less outdated than before and today I found that Dmitry Timoshkov removed all references to Mike Kronenberg's Wine binary distribution at http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/

This is unappropriate censorship to me.
http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs?action=diff&rev2=39&rev1=40

Am I upset?  It costs me precious time to write code and
documentation, so I dislike it when it gets deleted for
uncomprehensible reasons.  Censorship may be too strong a word.

The only gripes I understand about Kronenberg's work are:
- Although he agreed to change the name from Darwin to Wine in May, he has not yet done so. Cf. http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-May/075775.html
- Similarly, the license is still GPL, while Wine switched to LGPL long ago.

Other than that, his work seems solid and provides for a great user experience:

+ It's built with Xcode 2.5, so it does not suffer from bug #14920
  http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14920
  So 16bit applications work.

+ It provides a WineHelper GUI applications that supposedly makes it
  easy to start applications by clicking on icons.
  I never used it and am still researching the equivalent of
  xyz.desktop files from Linux.
  winemenubuilder does not work on MacOS so far.

+ It contains a newer FreeType library than Apple's which I've read is buggy.
  I can confirm that e.g. his winecfg "About" page looks as crisp as
  on Linux, whereas my build using only Apple resources shows ugly 'W'
  and kerning: in "Bibliothek", there should be one pixel horizontal
  space between letters, never 2.  On Linux all lines are exactly one
  pixel wide, crisp as if hand-drawn.
  HKCU\FontSmoothing does not help, as the ugly 'W' just gets shades
  of grey.
  Perhaps the only difference is Tahoma.ttf (the 'f' looks different),
  i.e. font files rather than FreeType, but so far I did not further
  investigate this issue.

+ He's been providing a binary distribution for a long time.  Linux
  experience shows that most people tend to download binaries rather than
  build themselves from source.  Users of gentoo are sometimes
  considered exotic for that reason.  OTOH on Mac, this seems normal, as
  neither Fink nor MacPorts provide online binary repositories. Strange.

+ I looked into his build script.
  http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/buildenv-1.1.5.zip
  It is basically ./configure & make as far as Wine is concerned.
  I can start /Volumes/Darwine/Contents.../bin/wine foo.exe like on Linux.
  Beside that, it builds WineHelper, FreeType and lots of other open
  source libraries.
  All but one of the 3-4 patches therein are obsolete (already in Wine
  git or perhaps only needed on Tiger).  There's a single patch not in
  Wine: XGravity event handling. Hopefully Mike can comment on it.
  Presumably it should get into Wine as well.

So to me his binary appears like a pretty normal Wine build. This is
not Cedega.  I am about to submit a bug report to Wine bugzilla about
MIDI audio based on his binary; I see no reason to dismiss it.  Sadly
I cannot produce the bug compiling myself, because of the above
all-16bit-apps-crash bug with the Xcode3.x that I own.

Not knowing whether there have been past disputes between him and
others, Mr. Kronenberg (whom I don't know) appears to me like a normal
user of Web and Mac resources.  This does not justify censorship.

I've updates to other MacOS Wiki pages in the queue that I'll put on
hold until the situation clarifies -- hopefully for the best to all people.

Please get together.

Regards,
	Jörg Höhle



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