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

[Christopher Morgan]

Two points to be made from the perspective of a wine developer.  The
first is that 16 bit apps are becoming fewer and fewer and the usefulness
of supporting 16 bit apps at all is questionable considering how many have
32 bit counterparts.  This isn't to say that there is no need for 16 bit
support in Wine, it just shouldn't be a focus today when most apps are 32
bit.  Today in wine our 16 bit support is based off of calling the 32
bit counterparts of the functions, I believe there are some cases where
this is reversed but that may not be true and certainly is being fixed. 16
bit support would improve much more rapidly if we had more people that had
16 bit apps they wanted to use also developing for wine.

The second point is that 95/98/NT(4 and 5) have quite a bit of
functionality in common.  I would venture to say that there are only very
specific and rare occasions where behaviour is slightly different among
the versions.  Right now wine targets NT/2000 support as its primary goal,
as MS is planning to migrate everyone up to those platforms.  I'm sure
there must be things that cause incompatibilities between Nt/2000 and
95/98 but I'm not aware of any, some other wine developers might know of
some however.

So I suppose I'm saying that having two or more versions of wine
is unnecessary as much of the functionality is duplicated.  Right now we
have the support for 16 bit apps, it just needs to be improved.

Chris


On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Daniel Sabo wrote:

> I would agree, 16bit apps don't work well on Win95 yet wine trys to make them
> work allong with every thing else. I would at least break it into
> Wine9x/NT/2k and Wine3.11. As far as I can see the apps that don't work in
> NT/2k don't have that much hope for working in wine so there would only
> need to be 2 real divisions.
>
> You might have mor luck on the wine.devel forum though, it's on the wine
> news server.
>