wine-announce February 2001

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Wine Weekly News #82 (2001 Week 07)
by Eric Pouech 14 Feb '01

14 Feb '01

please enjoy this week issue A+ -- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle Wine Weekly News All the News that Fits, we print. Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for February 12, 2001 . _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Keeping track of Wine _________________________________________________________________ After two weeks away from Wine, Alexandre returned to a truckload of patches... * John R. Sheets (CodeWeavers) documented the SGML documentation. * Andreas Mohr (CodeWeavers) adapted wineconf for the new config file format. * Ove Kåven (TransGaming) fixed some DIB section and DGA2 bugs, and started adding a DirectDraw HAL to the x11drv. * Marcus Meissner made the PostScript driver able to automatically find .afm files provided by software like GhostScript and others, so the user doesn't have to configure .afm file locations manually. * James Abbatiello (CodeWeavers) implemented QueryPerformanceCounter using the Pentium's RDTSC instruction. * * Other Workers/Bugfixers: Marcus Meissner (printing, ddraw, misc), Guy Albertelli (common controls), Lionel Ulmer (ddraw), Jon Griffiths (locale hashes, shlwapi), Rein Klazes (Malayan locale), Patrik Stridvall (winapi_check), Duane Clark (print dialog), Peter Ganten (afm fixes), Lawson Whitney + CodeWeavers: Andreas Mohr (various), Huw D M Davies (print dialog, enh.metafiles), James Abbatiello (shell, common controls, file mappings), Dmitry Timoshkov (enh.metafiles, MDI, Unicode), François Gouget (winemaker, Winelib, common controls), Susan Farley (pager control, window handling), Chris Morgan (listview/shellview control), Josh DuBois (portability), Aric Stewart (clipboard), Eric Kohl + Macadamian: James Hatheway (multimedia) _________________________________________________________________ Discussions on wine-devel _________________________________________________________________ This week, 87 posts consumed 335 K. There were 36 different contributors, 17 (47%) posted more than once, and 15 (41%) posted last week too. The top posters of the week were: * 6 posts in 26 K by "Patrik Stridvall" <ps(a)leissner.se> * 6 posts in 22 K by Francois Gouget <fgouget(a)free.fr> * 6 posts in 19 K by gerard patel <gerard.patel(a)asi.fr> * 6 posts in 19 K by Andreas Mohr <amohr(a)codeweavers.com> * 6 posts in 14 K by Eric Pouech <Eric.Pouech(a)wanadoo.fr> * 5 posts in 16 K by David Elliott <dfe(a)infinite-internet.net> * 4 posts in 14 K by Alan Chandler <alan(a)chandlerfamily.org.uk> * 4 posts in 13 K by Thomas Flynn <flynnt(a)acm.org> * 4 posts in 12 K by Jon Griffiths <tntjpgriff(a)tsnxt.co.uk> * 4 posts in 12 K by James Sutherland <jas88(a)cam.ac.uk> * 4 posts in 12 K by "Ove Kaaven" <ovehk(a)ping.uio.no> * 3 posts in 7 K by Ulrich Weigand <weigand(a)immd1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> * 2 posts in 8 K by Huw D M Davies <h.davies1(a)physics.ox.ac.uk> * 2 posts in 5 K by Uwe Bonnes <bon(a)elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> * 2 posts in 5 K by "David D. Hagood" <wowbagger(a)sktc.net> * 2 posts in 28 K by Ian Pilcher <pilcher(a)concentric.net> * 2 posts in 11 K by Marcus Meissner <marcus(a)jet.franken.de> Wine and reverse engineering Announce Paul Merrell posted an article from PlanetIT about some recent decisions made in the USA regarding the legal aspects of reverse engineering ([1] http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/security/news/PIT20010123S000 1/1?spsubcat=bugs_flaws). Paul even quoted some part of the article " Hypothetically, similar efforts taken by others to reverse-engineer Microsoft Windows could be deemed justifiable if the aim of those efforts were to make other companies' programs, designed for Windows, run on an operating system other than Windows. This assumes that the 9th Circuit ruling holds up."" In non legal terms, this would mean that Wine developers could reverse-engineer Windows without fearing some troubles from Microsoft layers horde. Robert Cunningham shed some more lights on this matter: Unfortunately, this decision applies directly only to those bringing such cases within the California 9th Circuit Court. While other courts may "take note" of this decision, it has not yet risen to the level of a "precedent". Unless, of course, the case gets appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, they decide to hear it, and they then decide to affirm the decision. Then (and only then) would the decision become the law of the land. Until that time, it will likely first have to be pursued on a case-by-case basis in all other Circuit Courts. Which means we can expect all similar cases to avoid the 9th Circuit like the plague so long as they have other venues to run to. As Paul mentioned in the quote he selected, the key item involves moving an application to a different platform. Application "portability" may legally no longer require "porting"! It may instead allow for "OS Compatibility Layers" to be written instead. This may also drive a needed wedge into the notion of migrating applications into the OS, a strategy MS has evolved into a fine art. This affects far more than Wine: One project that comes to mind is MAME (games). There are many more seemingly similar projects that are NOT affected, such as MOL(Mac-on-Linux), Win4Lin, Plex86, VmWare and probably several others that actually run the target OS, not emulate (clone) it. An extreme interpretation of this decision could be as follows: If I need a reason to legally clone a new feature in some market-leading desktop OS, all I need to do is find an app (any app) that uses that feature, then declare my intent to make that app run under some other (any other) OS. It does not matter if the feature being emulated is "documented" or not. Taken further, it may even be possible to dispose of the specific API used to implement the feature, and use a different one instead. Eventually (assuming this decision survives), the courts will see that ALL such forms of reverse engineering should be legal WITHOUT the necessity of an app to port. However, this notion still needs to be more fully explored via additional cases before its full scope can be determined. Presently, the scope appears to be very restricted: The article points out that the DeCSS decision would probably not be affected in any way. In the current environment, this is probably true. But what if you can convince the courts to view DVD "content" as a "program"! While this may seem obviously true to technical folks, especially those who create multimedia apps and content for a living, it may take many visits to court to properly communicate this understanding to the legal system. Anyway, since most of the available content security systems ARE software, and MS has already migrated theirs into the latest versions of Windows, this entire issue already has the potential to snowball completely out of the control of OS and content companies, and possibly even Congress itself. With the major media companies trying to tie software protection and content protection together under copyright law (via laws such as DMCA and UCITA), this may be just the wedge needed to pry them back apart. This could help Wine in the long term on some legal aspects when needed. However, as Robert pointed out, this is just a first step, and many more still have to be made. PS printer driver and fonts Evolution After Huw Davies submitted a patch were he hardcoded some font mappings (from Windows' Courier New to Courier) in the Wine postscript driver, Ian Pilcher started asking a few questions: Hmm. I haven't been able to get Courier to scale properly. (It prints way too large from Lotus Notes.) I was actually thinking of doing exactly the reverse. What do you think of the idea of user-configurable mappings, a la the X font aliases? Huw agreed that having this kind of substitution list would be a nice thing. Regarding the scaling issue, Huw continued: " Note if you're using ghostscript to process the output then the fonts will look about 15% larger, that's because GS's fonts are rather bigger than Adobe's and you're probably using Adobe's AFMs. Other than that then I'm seeing Wine's Courier to be about another 15% larger than the output from Windows." Gav State added:"Just FYI, the corelwine tree has support for psdrv font mapping that you might be able to use. In general, it would be nice to move the psdrv font work that was done in the corelwine tree into main CVS. While the x11drv/psdrv cross-dependency issue will have to be fixed, I suspect that it shouldn't be that hard to convert the FontTastic API calls into appropriate FreeType calls - there are only 11 places where a FontTastic API is called, and about 15 more where font properties specific to the FontTastic font server are accessed - most of which are just for added accuracy in the calculation of internal and external leading. The printing code that's in that tree is really quite good - when we were testing it, we were often able to hold the Wine generated output and the Win32 generated output up to the light and see no significant differences between them. Only after several pages of output would the cumulative error in character widths build up to the point where WordPerfect would break a line at a different word. " Note: FontTastic is a TrueType server that Corel did embed in its Linux distribution and allowed the Wine port of the Corel tools to get information about TT fonts - which still needs to be done in Wine (see [2]Xfree 4.02 and Winefor more info). Ian and Huw then discussed the details of the implementation. Ian was a bit confused with all the possible fonts (and type of fonts like TrueType, X11 Type1...) and searched a way to help the configuration. Huw answered "I anticipate that most people will just be happy using TT/Type1/.fon fonts all served by FreeType and will not bother using XLFD fonts at all. This makes font configuration quite easy, we just tell the FreeType font driver which font files we want it to serve and that's it. The psdrv may still want to substitute builtin type1 fonts, but that seems to me to be psdrv's role and thus its configuration is unique to that; this becomes more obvious when you think that the user may install 2 instances of psdrv that print to different printers which may have different fontsets installed, therefore font substitution would be on a printer by printer basis. " Part of the modifications discussed here have been added to the CVS tree. Messages and pointers Issue Marcus Meissner ran into an interesting issue: I have an application that handles several text edit controls. At one point it flips from the first to the second (after you have entered the fourth character). This is done by a function, which does (simplified) this: { DWORD startsel,endsel; PostMessageA(hwnd1,EM_GETSEL,&startsel,&endsel); SetFocus(hwnd2); PostMessageA(hwnd2,EM_SETSEL,0,0); /* ... */ CallWindowProcA(hwnd,....); return; } According to the +relay,+edit trace the EM_GETSEL is executed way _AFTER_ the return from the function, so, since it uses stackvalues, it then smashes the stack somewhere else. Ove Kaaven proposed a possible explanation: I remember Ulrich have been talking about [3]message parameters conversion ; there's the possibility that Windows recognizes that it's a message known to contain pointers, and so just drops the message, so that EM_GETSEL is simply never dispatched? Ulrich Weigand gave some further explanations: Yes. EM_GETSEL is classified as 'pointer message', and the 32-bit PostMessage in Win9x simply drops it. (The 16-bit PostMessage doesn't appear to care, but if a 16-bit message with pointers is about to be received by a 32-bit app, the Get/PeekMessage call drops the message...) You get DebugOutput messages like "PostMessage: ignoring posted message with pointer" or "GetMessage: ignoring retrieved message with pointer" when this happens. Later on, Marcus implemented the dropping of messages with pointers. Importing Wine to North America Report Well, WWN normally doesn't cover the OffTopic mails. But we'll do an exception this week. Wine-devel was posted with the following message: "I found your benchmark... it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but do you maybe have an idea on how I can find information about the demand for wine in Canada, or North America on the internet? I'm writing my thesis on importing german wine to Canada and need to go over the demand part too of course. " This of course produces lots of sarcasm from the developers. Andreas Mohr started with: "I just had to approve this one. It's just way too funny :-) "Wine benchmark"... ROTFD (ROTF drunkenly)" Eric Pouech (from France) kept going on with the sarcasms "hmmm I ROTFL:ed mainly because of "German Wine"... isn't that on oxymoron ?." This, of course, fired some discussion about Germany being able to produce some rather good Wine, and beer too... Anyway, all the Wine team wishes the best of luck to this fellow with his thesis... Startup directory and resulting behavior Issue Alan Chandler popped up some nasty behavior: I am trying to debug a game called Grand Prix Legends, running on Wine with the TransGaming patch. If just spent all day getting nowhere in winedbg because I couldn't get hold of what the game was doing. If I cd to the directory in which the game is installed (ie ~/win/sierra/gpl) and then run wine gpl.exe The program starts and fills the whole of my screen with a single black window. It sits there until I move the mouse, at which time it exits. I have just discovered that if I cd to the root of my c: drive (ie ~/win) and then run wine c:\\sierra\\gpl\\gpl.exe The program starts and I get a 640x480 window with the correct startup screen (I have "Desktop" = "640x480" in my config file). It is not managed (even though I have "Managed" = "Y" in my config file). However the program appears to partially work - in that * The program responds to the mouse when I click on the correct parts of the screen, * It runs a race with computer AI cars when I tell it too. Gav State was puzzled but somehow confirmed the issue: I can't think of why this is happening, but I can confirm that we've seen this with a few other programs, including 3DMark2000. I don't believe that it's an issue particular to the TG patch, but I don't know of any examples of this happening with, say, a pure OpenGL game that doesn't require the TG patch. The discussion then evolved in some more detailed explanation on graphics integration in Wine. But the problem describe here shall have to be looked at. Credits: [4]Doug Ridgway, [5]Eric Pouech, and [6]Ove Kåven. _________________________________________________________________ References 1. http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/security/news/PIT20010123S0001/1?s… 2. http://www.winehq.com/News/2000-52.html#2 3. http://www.winehq.com/News/1999-48.html#2 4. mailto:[email protected] 5. mailto:[email protected] 6. mailto:[email protected]

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Wine Weekly News #81 (2001 Week 06)
by Eric Pouech 07 Feb '01

07 Feb '01

please find enclosed this week slim edition... A+ -- --------------- Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/) "The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle Wine Weekly News All the News that Fits, we print. Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for February 05, 2001 . _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Keeping track of Wine _________________________________________________________________ Since Alexandre Julliard has been away most of the week for LinuxExpo in Paris, very few patches have been commmited: _________________________________________________________________ Discussions on wine-devel _________________________________________________________________ This week, 70 posts consumed 277 K. There were 28 different contributors, 16 (57%) posted more than once, and 10 (35%) posted last week too. The top posters of the week were: * 11 posts in 45 K by Ian Pilcher <pilcher(a)concentric.net> * 9 posts in 70 K by Ulrich Weigand <weigand(a)immd1.informatik.uni-erlangen.de> * 6 posts in 24 K by Huw D M Davies <h.davies1(a)physics.ox.ac.uk> * 5 posts in 18 K by Eric Pouech <Eric.Pouech(a)wanadoo.fr> * 3 posts in 6 K by gerard patel <gerard.patel(a)asi.fr> * 3 posts in 10 K by Jon Griffiths <tntjpgriff(a)tsnxt.co.uk> * 3 posts in 10 K by Gavriel State <gav(a)transgaming.com> Delphi and Kylix Announce Marcus Meissner posted some report about a Borland announcement ( [1]http://yahoofin.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4642327.html?tag=pt.yahoof in.financefeed..ne), even quoting some parts: Borland will unveil its Delphi programming kit for Linux, called Kylix. The product is designed to let people write software that works with Linux and Windows, sources said. The software has been developed with help from CodeWeavers, a group working to commercialize the Wine software for running Windows software on Linux machines. From various reports, it seems that Wine is used for porting the IDE to Linux, however, the compilation toolchain seems to be a raw port to Linux. DirectDraw & TransGaming Announce Gavriel State announced a new version of the TransGaming D3D patch ( for more details): Just wanted to mention that a new TransGaming patch is available from our web-site now. This patch is mostly just to bring our AFPLed D3D work into sync with the DirectX changes that we've contributed to WineHQ CVS lately. There's not much new on the D3D side, though we're working hard with some hardware and sofware vendors to improve performance there, which you'll see in upcoming releases. The nicest thing about the latest release is that we've incorporated Andreas Mohr's SetWindowLong patch, which along with the work he did on CreateProcess now allows InstallShield installers to work properly. The other big news item is that with our recent DirectInput work, and a minor tweak to Wine's OpenGL thunking layer, American McGee's Alice demo now works perfectly. The full version won't work, due to SafeDisk copy protection, but we're starting to talk to engineers at Macrovision to help us resolve that issue. Credits: [2]Doug Ridgway, [3]Eric Pouech, and [4]Ove Kåven. _________________________________________________________________ References Visible links 1. http://yahoofin.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4642327.html?tag=pt.yahoofin.finan… 2. mailto:[email protected] 3. mailto:[email protected] 4. mailto:[email protected] Hidden links: 5. http://www.winehq.com/News/2001-01.html#1

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wine-announce February 2001