winewrapper

Dimitrie O. Paun dpaun at rogers.com
Thu Nov 21 19:54:07 CST 2002


On November 21, 2002 08:20 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> It's very good that you are
> looking into it, I'm just trying to encourage you to make it pleasant
> the right way, instead of simply hiding the unpleasantness under a few
> scripts that won't fix the core issues.

It looks like you have made up your mind, but I have to raise this point, 
and this is as good as an occasion as any other.

I fully agree with you: the current way is lacking, we need a better way,
let's not hide it under the rug. 100% with you. But there are at least
two orthogonal issues here:
  1. The current way of dealing with Winelib is lacking
	100% with you. However, as you said, the solution is not trivial,
	so it's probably far in the future. I think we have far larger
	problems to solve, and forcing people to look into this one it
	may not be the best thing for Wine. Frankly, I'd rather work on
	the listview, and tree view, I think those are a lot more visible
	than this one, right?
  2. The ability to link a Winelib app to a in-tree Wine
	Now, even if we had the perfect solution for (1), I would say
	this is still needed. And it's needed because Wine is not a stable
	library that you install, and work with. You have to make numerous
	tries, and experiments, and _anyone_ doing anything with Winelib
	will need this ability for the near future.

I'd love for (1) to get solved, but I don't have the time, and expertise to
do it now. And even if I had, there are other items with higher priority on
my TODO. My focus is on (2). The only reason I looked into compiling Winelib
apps is to gather some experience, crystallize it in the form of fixes for 
the Wine tree (so that other don't have to go through the pain), and hope 
that people will start porting more to Winelib.

This is our only chance for Wine to become an accepted platform. And we, the
Wine project, simply don't have the resources to go and compile every Win32
app under Wine. But we can try to make it easy for others to do so, and hope
that they do. How we should go about this is the subject of a different mail,
so I will not go into it here. However, I have to note that in the current 
state, we are not in the position to invite developers to use Winelib. 
I know, the solution I propose is not perfect, but remember: perfect is the
enemy of good. If you have another solution, I'd love to hear about it.
But it the meanwhile, what I've proposed might just do the trick for the
next year or so. And when we have to change it, well, we'll cross that bridge
when we get to it.

It would be so much more beneficial to us to get a bunch of apps using 
Winelib now, rather then in 1-2 years when we devise the perfect scheme. 
And don't forget, with those apps we also get a lot of Win32 developers.

-- 
Dimi.




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