[Wine] winetools and ie6

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 08:20, Bry Melvin wrote:
> Guess I'll probably get flamed now, but my software testing has put
> wine+winetools as more functional than wine or Crossover. At least
> from a point of view of someone wanting to do Graphics production and
> migrating from Win or OS/2 to Linux (and work predominately from a
> GUI).

Ah, you have specific needs. That changes everything.

The wine/winetools debate has been going on for ages. Here's the 
summary:

Wine is a project still in alpha. The devs want people to use wine 
itself and figure out where the bugs are. Winetools and even ies4linux 
are stop-gap measures to get around areas where wine is still not fully 
functional. The devs also want to receive traffic on how wine 
works/doesn't work, they don't want to have to handle traffic on 
winetools and the stuff it does. Winetools and ies4linus don't do 
anything unusual that the wine devs need to investigate - all they do 
is register heaps of native overrides where a wine lib is replaced by a 
real windows one nicked off a windows machine. Wine devs giving support 
on this list to winetools users is coutner-productive to the devs time 
as they (mostly) don't get paid for what they do. The goal is to get 
all Win32 functions correctly implemented in wine, not concentrate on 
the stop-gap measures.

This all blew up a few months back and is documented somewhere. The 
eventual agreement was that the wine web page would retain the existing 
link to winetools with disclaimers that it was unsupported by the wine 
devs, and the recommendation was for wine user to use wine and help get 
the bugs out. Winetools is of course free to build on top of wine and 
build it's own support community for those users where raw wine is 
still too rough a solution to be realistic.

So your readers are regular users. For them to get IE running *right now 
today*, they will get best results from Crossover or ies4linux. To get 
Office running, Crossover is easily the better solution. winetools may 
suit them better for other well known apps. In any event, they won't 
find much support for any of those solution on this list (whose purpose 
is to get wine itself debugged and working better).

Reality check: Someday wine on it's own will be sufficient for Regular 
User Joe, but that day hasn't arrived yet.

Hope this help clear up things a bit

alan