The DIB engine... does anyone know how to get it into Wine?

[Luke Benstead]

Hi all,

I've been watching the DIB engine work that has been going on in bug
421. It looks like Max has made massive progress getting Autocad
working by the sound of it, almost perfectly and also improvements in
Starcraft have been reported. However, he accepts (and Alexandre has
confirmed) that neither of the two approaches he has tried is the
right one and he believes (as do others) that any correct approach
requires massive changes to GDI32, which if I read it right, no one
seems to know how to do incrementally.

Autocad is one of those apps, like Photoshop, which people need to be
able to use and won't switch away from Windows without it. In fact,
Autocad more so than Photoshop because there is no (almost) feature
equivalent alternative available (like the GIMP for Photoshop). So
it's frustrating to know that someone has it working, but vanilla Wine
isn't going to see it working in the near future.

My question is this: does anyone know how to incrementally implement
the necessary changes? Is it even possible? If it's not possible, is
it work considering branching Wine to implement it correctly, for
merging back into trunk at a later stage once it's been thoroughly
tested? I'm wondering if Wine's development process just doesn't allow
for a big change like this, and perhaps it's the development model
that is the reason bug 421 is so long standing?

Any thoughts, I just want to spur some discussion on this because it
seems that everyone that attempts a DIB engine hits a wall :)

Luke.