Wine Front-End development

n0dalus n0dalus+wine at gmail.com
Sat Apr 15 09:48:44 CDT 2006


On 4/15/06, Karl Lattimer <karl at qdh.org.uk> wrote:
>
> If this http://wiki.winehq.org/ThemingSupport is to become a part of
> wine (RE: GTK support for themes), I don't see what the problem with
> using GTK is. GTK is available on all distributions that I know of, and
> definitely all popular distributions. winetools already uses the legacy

Just because GTK support may be added for themes, doesn't mean that
wine's tools should be GTK specific. The idea is that you write it
using Win32 gui controls and then if the user's computer has GTK then
it gets themed automatically. For this tool to have the best
compatibility it shouldn't require gtk to be compiled in.

> On the subject of dependencies, if the application is not required by
> the wine core then surely dependencies are irrelevant, and the shortest
> development path (python gtk, glade imho) should be considered as it
> means the application will be available much faster than developing it
> in C which could take far longer to develop.

Most development time can be cut by thinking the implementation
through properly at the beginning. A good C programmer should be able
to write a maintainable application in a similar amount of time to a
good python programmer. (Note however, that being a good C programmer
can be harder than being a good python programmer.)

I see many python developers get into the habit of writing short-term
maintainable code and replacing it often long-term. I think this is
just because developers get used to python being so simple to rewrite
and saying, 'I can fix it later.' This is both a good thing and a bad
thing.

> If I say it _must_ be written in C win32, perl or bash then immediately
> developers will consider the issues, ok perl could do a lot of it easily
> but there are some problems in other areas, bash would be a large amount
> of work and win32 C would mean lots and lots of code auditing,
> re-factoring and bug fixing, probably resulting in a 5 year development
> process to get the application to a point where it is in regular use.
> These issues may serve to deter a developer from taking on the project
> with a view to "I'm not getting my hands on that train wreck".

That's just not true at all. While I see python programmers regularly
regurgitate this whole 'C is unmaintainable and takes years to write'
thing, have you considered what language python is written in? And is
it a buggy train wreck? Those new modules you use after a python
upgrade, did they take 5 years to write?

Everybody knows a badly made win32 C program is possibly the worst
possible thing imaginable, but there are many examples where well
written, maintainable and relatively bug-free applications were
written quite quickly in C.

I don't have anything against python, and it is a great language to
use, but that doesn't mean it's the best possible language to use for
every conceivable project. Wine is supposed to be a way to run Win32
programs on UNIX, and not every unix flavour comes with GTK and
python. I think people would say Wine has enough run-time
dependencies, and there's no strong reason why another one can't be
avoided here.

My two cents,
n0dalus.



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