why is Kronenberg's Wine/Mac work blacklisted on winehq?

Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k at gmail.com
Fri Jun 26 05:00:36 CDT 2009


On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Austin English<austinenglish at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 8:56 AM, <Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Yesterday I edited http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs to be much less outdated than before and today I found that Dmitry Timoshkov removed all references to Mike Kronenberg's Wine binary distribution at http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/
>>
>> This is unappropriate censorship to me.
>> http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs?action=diff&rev2=39&rev1=40
>>
>> Am I upset?  It costs me precious time to write code and
>> documentation, so I dislike it when it gets deleted for
>> uncomprehensible reasons.  Censorship may be too strong a word.
>>
>> The only gripes I understand about Kronenberg's work are:
>> - Although he agreed to change the name from Darwin to Wine in May, he has not yet done so. Cf. http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-May/075775.html
>> - Similarly, the license is still GPL, while Wine switched to LGPL long ago.
>>
>> Other than that, his work seems solid and provides for a great user experience:
>>
>> + It's built with Xcode 2.5, so it does not suffer from bug #14920
>>  http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14920
>>  So 16bit applications work.
>>
>> + It provides a WineHelper GUI applications that supposedly makes it
>>  easy to start applications by clicking on icons.
>>  I never used it and am still researching the equivalent of
>>  xyz.desktop files from Linux.
>>  winemenubuilder does not work on MacOS so far.
>>
>> + It contains a newer FreeType library than Apple's which I've read is buggy.
>>  I can confirm that e.g. his winecfg "About" page looks as crisp as
>>  on Linux, whereas my build using only Apple resources shows ugly 'W'
>>  and kerning: in "Bibliothek", there should be one pixel horizontal
>>  space between letters, never 2.  On Linux all lines are exactly one
>>  pixel wide, crisp as if hand-drawn.
>>  HKCU\FontSmoothing does not help, as the ugly 'W' just gets shades
>>  of grey.
>>  Perhaps the only difference is Tahoma.ttf (the 'f' looks different),
>>  i.e. font files rather than FreeType, but so far I did not further
>>  investigate this issue.
>>
>> + He's been providing a binary distribution for a long time.  Linux
>>  experience shows that most people tend to download binaries rather than
>>  build themselves from source.  Users of gentoo are sometimes
>>  considered exotic for that reason.  OTOH on Mac, this seems normal, as
>>  neither Fink nor MacPorts provide online binary repositories. Strange.
>>
>> + I looked into his build script.
>>  http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/buildenv-1.1.5.zip
>>  It is basically ./configure & make as far as Wine is concerned.
>>  I can start /Volumes/Darwine/Contents.../bin/wine foo.exe like on Linux.
>>  Beside that, it builds WineHelper, FreeType and lots of other open
>>  source libraries.
>>  All but one of the 3-4 patches therein are obsolete (already in Wine
>>  git or perhaps only needed on Tiger).  There's a single patch not in
>>  Wine: XGravity event handling. Hopefully Mike can comment on it.
>>  Presumably it should get into Wine as well.
>>
>> So to me his binary appears like a pretty normal Wine build. This is
>> not Cedega.  I am about to submit a bug report to Wine bugzilla about
>> MIDI audio based on his binary; I see no reason to dismiss it.  Sadly
>> I cannot produce the bug compiling myself, because of the above
>> all-16bit-apps-crash bug with the Xcode3.x that I own.
>
> The lingering problem is that those extra features make it different
> from 'vanilla' wine. While most of the patches in there are obsolete,
> they're still in the source and still applied. The build source isn't
> current, some of the package downloads are busted (not really a reason
> to 'block it' though).
>
> In that discussion you've already referenced, most of this is already mentioned.
>
> If there were a plain vanilla wine built on OS X, I think more
> developers would be receptive to it. Unfortunately, most developers
> don't have access to Mac's, and/or aren't focused on packaging/etc.,
> but on more practical coding (fixing bugs, adding features, etc.).
>
> --
> -Austin
>
>

I would be willing to assist with any Mac issues as I would need a
LGPL'ed version of Wine on OSX myself. I'm assisting bringing a
university program to Linux/Mac using Wine and for that I need decent
Mac support. Darwine set some steps in the right direction and we
could help making it a better experience. I do agree that the license
/ name issues should be solved.

I'm also interested in a way to create application bundles of Wine +
win32 app for Mac and plan to work on that. Perhaps others are
interested as well.

Roderick



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