Wine, WIDE & Unix (was: Support for pkgconfig)

[Gregory M. Turner]

On Monday 28 April 2003 01:07 am, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> On April 27, 2003 05:32 pm, Francois Gouget wrote:
> > So the situation will remain the same: we will haev KDE applications and
> > WIDE applications and they will not be interoperable. I.e. it won't be
> > possible to insert an Excel spreadsheet in a KWord document.
>
> No, it will be better: you will be able to have deep integration between
> Win32 apps and Gnome apps, no small feat.
>
> > Does that include interoperability with OLE/COM/DCOM or just the look
> > and feel integration?
>
> Well, the OLE/COM/DCOM bit is the interesting one, the look and feel
> is simple and has other solutions, as we discussed.
>
> > I believe where we differ is on the method:
> >  * I think we should work on Wine to make that possible (though
> >    there may be some work to do in Gnome and KDE).

a few issues are being conflated here perhaps: 
1) what browser?  
2) how can we get wine apps to have a consistient look-and-feel on
gnome and kde (and other) desktops?
3) (the original thread I believe?) what are the prospects of using wine as a 
window manager?

The third may be beyond my ability to answer, but 1) and 2) seem easy to me...

As for the browser issue, it's been discussed on the list ad infinitum and the 
consensus was that we should lean towards konq integration.  

OTOH,  if someone had a well-done, LGPL, working base of completely original 
code, or magical code to get mozilla or opera or lynx or what-have-you to do 
everything wine needs -- I would be surprised if it wouldn't find its way 
into wine (or at least into my tree at home !!!  ;))  So he who codes first 
wins the debate, as usual ;)

There is no reason, I think, that we theoretically couldn't accomidate 
different browsers via run-time configs -- some people really, really 
need/want their favorite browser -- the debate is therefore unwinnable, we 
need them all :P  

As for the look-and-feel thing, I have stronger opinions, so I will try to say 
less -- I imagine that I will fail ;)  First, I should note that there do 
exist some efforts to do this already in wine, like "icon tray" support, 
cut-and-paste, etc... so it's not like there's no precedent for what you 
propose, Dimi... (except maybe the WM thing I guess).

If you ask me, we should look to implement the (undocumented?) XP skinning 
API's -- with a deliberite sprinkling of internal extensions to clean up some 
of the messy parts if they are too slow for "built in" wine skins.

It's probably not /that/ difficult to figure out, especially if one is armed 
with something like WindowBlinds to hack on.  After all, they figured it out 
at StarDock, (although they might have the "top secret" special sauce from MS 
for all I know...) and some of it is probably out there on the net.

Once you have a skinning API, you just implement a 'gnome compat' and 'kde 
compat' skin (or even just an automagical one that does both) the thing would 
"just work", right?  Why, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours ;)  
(WARNING: that last part was a joke, if you set your watch by this you very 
well may miss work for several years).

Might be harder than some other approach to this problem, but IMO it would be 
a waste to expend labor building "skins" into wine using some other 
architecture which might be non-orthagonal to that used by MS operating 
systems.

-- 
"Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding
danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is
either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward
change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is
strength undefeatable." --Helen Keller

gmt