Wine compatibility

[Austin English]

2011/3/23 Adam Kłobukowski <adamklobukowski at gmail.com>:
> On 23.03.2011 16:01, James McKenzie wrote:
>>
>> On 3/23/11, Adam Kłobukowski<adamklobukowski at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello
>>>
>>> I have a question for Wine developers, not 100% related to development,
>>> so: please excuse me for wasting your time.
>>>
>>> Officially sated, Wine wants to be 'bug-by-bug' implementation of
>>> Windows APIs. On the other hand, it is known that all (?) version of
>>> Windows contain 'hacks' to make important and not well behaving
>>> applications work (mostly workarounds for application bugs). This
>>> 'hacks' work by detecting that a faulty app is running, and turning
>>> special 'hack' mode for such app. Because of this, black box testing
>>> often used by Wine developers will not detect such workarounds, and
>>> applications that (seem to) work perfectly well under Windows, will not
>>> work under Wine.
>>>
>> And some programs that worked 'just fine' under WindowsXP will not in
>> any other version due to the internal hacks.
>>
>>> Is there a solution for this? What is Wine devs position on this matter?
>>
>> Sure.  We look at the interaction between the program and the Windows
>> API (this is how true Black Box testing is done), implement a test
>> case and then build code to the test case.
>>
>>>
>>> Side question: Windows could make a 'clean start' with 64 bit
>>> environment, did they?
>>
>> If that happened, there would have not been any version of Windows
>> with 64 bitness for about twenty years.  Microsoft 'extended' their
>> code to work in a 64 bit environment.  This is common with existing 32
>> bit code to extend it to 64 bits.
>
> What I meant as 'clean start' is that they could drop all hacks in 64bit
> environment. I wonder if that happened.

Looking at the results from the wine test suite on 64-bit, I'd say no.

-- 
-Austin