Developer's path to Windows/*NIX multi-platform?

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On April 1, 2004 6:30 pm, greensh at knology.net wrote:
> I'd have to say, so far from what I've seen Wine still has a long way to go
> before it's ready for production, and reliable use... it's getting there
> but just not there yet. It's great for porting apps, but too poorly
> documented for actual development.

You are correct in that we're not as good as we'd like to be.
We've done a lot of work, yet there's plenty more in front of us.
That being said, I'd like to note a few things:
  1. Qt/wxWindows/etc. is a good cross-platform solution if
     you start afresh. However, I strongly feel Wine is a
     better tool if you're porting a large application.
  2. Even if you start fresh, there may be reasons you would
     still want to use Wine: you don't want to use C++,
     you know Win32 and you don't want to learn something else,
     you don't want to buy the commercial Qt license,
     you have some 3rd party binary DLLs that you have to use.
  3. I don't think we suffer from so poor documentation.
     99.9% of Wine is all about Win32, and the MSDN is a
     pretty good, freely available over the web source of
     documentation. Not to mention innumerable number of
     books and so on on the subject. We try hard to fit into
     existing standards, and in theory you should require
     very little Wine-specific documentation. We're not there
     yet, so in the interim feel free to ask on wine-devel.

Bottom line, Wine is IMO an interesting option for a lot of
projects. We just need a bit more manpower to iron out some
of our bugs :)

-- 
Dimi.