Horses for courses - why not Wine 3.11, Wine 95, Wine 98, Wine NT etc.?

[Mike Whittaker]

Having unsuccessfully browsed around the Wine FAQ for an answer, forgive my
asking
this directly !

Wouldn't it make a certain amount of sense to have separate Wine projects
with
partially shared codebases, to realise compatibility with the different
flavours of Windows ?
[I have not inspected the codebase, so excuse me if this is already the
case.]

In this way, you are not aiming at a continually moving target, and the
feature set for the now-legacy Win 3.11, 95 and 98 should be fixed.
In addition, discontinued features or APIs could then be deleted from
support in newer platforms.

There would then be two components of Wine development effort:
1. to ensure 'absolute' compatibility with existing platforms
2. to extend for developing/unfinished platforms

Obviously the codebase should be set up to allow code which is partially
shared between targets on a file-by-file or subsystem basis, and some fairly
stringent guidelines/administration as to when a shared code line should be
split off into a target-specific variant.

The user of Wine would then opt to use the 'highest' level of compatibility
required for their application.

Regards,

Mike Whittaker

PS. the mailto links on the winehq.com pages don't work - not even
'postmaster', which RFC822 (?) says always should !