[Wine] How can I detect WINE from my program?

[Sjors Gielen]

> This is a good point. But you can't force developers to do that, also because there exists easy workarounds. Running a native binary, reading the environment. It's not that hard, maybe unreliable. 
> Why not cooperate? Make an API call like "bool IsWineBugFixed(int bugnr);". That function will read from a .conf/inf file that is updated at each wine release. Until the bug is fixed the Windows code will execute in custom way else it will run in a native way.

IsWineBugFixed() sounds like *totally* the wrong way around. Let it be
this way: just assume the bug is fixed, report it at Wine (with test
cases or even patches), and your program will work once the bug is
fixed. Until then, put a web page up or whatever saying "This program
does not work on Wine because of <a>bug 1234</a>" or "This program does
not work on Wine, unless you compile Wine yourself with <a>this
patch</a> compiled in".

Wine developers aren't, and shouldn't be, interested in hacky solutions
to get as much Windows programs as possible running on Wine; they are
interested in making Wine look like Windows as much as possible (that
coincidentally has the result of Windows programs working on Wine). The
only reason Wine is so great right now is because of that attitude.
Therefore, I also don't think they will ever implement *anything* like
an isWineBugFixed or isWine or whatever - it is not their goal, not
their way of "fixing" things, and it shouldn't be.

It takes less time to write a good test case that shows different
behavior in Wine than in native Windows, than it takes to implement a
workaround, maintain it, and remove it later
but-only-if-wine-version-is-foo (and then again, there's no reliable way
of checking that). Implementing Wine workarounds only makes the problem
worse in the long term, fixing (or even reporting) bugs in Wine makes
the problem *disappear forever*.

Sjors

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