Questions about Wine explorer.exe desktop work

[Alexandre Julliard]

Joel Holdsworth <joel at airwebreathe.org.uk> writes:

> Dear All,
>
> I've been watching AJ's work on improving wine when running in desktop
> mode with respect to the task bar and start menu. I was wondering what
> the motivation for this work was? but it's a cool feature whatever the
> reason.

It's meant to be used for Android, since we can only display inside a
fullscreen window at the moment. It's a stopgap until we can have proper
top-level windows, supposedly coming in Android N.

> I wanted to ask suggest/ask if it would be a good idea to import or
> base-off-of the ROS shell32 code, convert it to C and use that for the
> new desktop code? It seems to me that the architecture would more
> closely match windows, so the ROS and Microsoft explorer.exe would then
> run on Wine. Also this would move us towards having the ROS and Wine
> explorer.exe and shell32 merged - and the ROS guys seem to care quite a
> lot about that stuff, so it would be good to unite the two project's
> efforts.

The ReactOS people have to care because they obviously need an explorer,
but on the Wine side our goal is to integrate with the host desktop;
running a native explorer would be a cool hack, but it's not worth a lot
of effort. Even if ReactOS went to the trouble of rewriting their shell
code in C and merging it into Wine, they'd probably still be the only
ones developing it, so it's not clear that they would gain much.

There's also the question of how all that internal shell32 stuff has
been figured out...

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org