WWN: wn20030815_183.xml2

Fri Aug 15 00:52:42 CDT 2003

wn20030815_183.xml

-brian
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<kc>

<title>Wine Traffic</title>

<author contact="http://www.theshell.com/~vinn">Brian Vincent</author>
<issue num="183" date="08/15/2003" />
<intro> This is the 183rd release of the weekly Wine Weekly News publication.
Its main goal is to have aspirations of going on tour with a rock band. It also serves to inform you of what's going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available. You can find more info at <a href="http://www.winehq.com">www.winehq.com</a> </intro>
<stats posts="141" size="378" contrib="48" multiples="26" lastweek="22">

<person posts="20" size="58" who="Dmitry Timoshkov" />
<person posts="14" size="37" who="Dimitrie O. Paun" />
<person posts="10" size="23" who="Alexandre Julliard" />
<person posts="7" size="22" who="Shachar Shemesh" />
<person posts="7" size="21" who="Vincent B&#233;ron" />
<person posts="5" size="12" who="Phil Krylov" />
<person posts="5" size="11" who="Eric Pouech" />
<person posts="4" size="12" who="Dustin Navea" />
<person posts="4" size="10" who="Lionel Ulmer" />
<person posts="4" size="8" who=" &lt;puoti at inwind.it&gt;" />
<person posts="4" size="8" who="BiGgUn" />
<person posts="3" size="11" who="Mike Hearn" />
<person posts="3" size="10" who="Jason Edmeades" />
<person posts="3" size="9" who="Mike McCormack" />
<person posts="3" size="8" who="Richard Cohen" />
<person posts="3" size="7" who="Jonathan Wilson" />
<person posts="3" size="7" who="(jonwil)" />
<person posts="2" size="6" who="Boaz Harrosh" />
<person posts="2" size="6" who="dd jj" />
<person posts="2" size="5" who="root" />
<person posts="2" size="5" who="flyker" />
<person posts="2" size="4" who="Raul" />
<person posts="2" size="4" who=" (Dominik Strasser)" />
<person posts="2" size="4" who="Matt Seitz" />
<person posts="2" size="4" who="Jason Edmeades" />
<person posts="2" size="4" who="Tom" />
<person posts="1" size="6" who="Sylvain Petreolle" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Rein Klazes" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Casey McGinty" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Martin Wilck" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Peter Birch" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Gregory M. Turner" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Peter Hunnisett" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Martin Fuchs" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Jon Bright" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Peter Stokes" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Stefan Leichter" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="PETREOLLE Sylvain" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Dan Kegel" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Christian Neumair" />
<person posts="1" size="2" who="Raphael Junqueira" />
<person posts="1" size="1" who="Mark Westcott" />
<person posts="1" size="1" who="Alfredo K. Kojima" />
<person posts="1" size="1" who="Michael Schluter" />
<person posts="1" size="1" who="wim delvaux" />
<person posts="1" size="1" who="Ove Kaaven" />

</stats>
<section 
	title="News: Wine-20030813, Interview with Francois Gouget, Linux Format Mag" 
	subject="News"
	archive="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/00.html" 
	posts="3"
	startdate="08/09/2003"
	enddate="08/15/2003"
>
<topic>News</topic>
<p>Wine-20030813 was released.  From the announcement:</p>
<quote who="Alexandre Julliard"><p>
WHAT'S NEW with Wine-20030813: (see ChangeLog for details)
<ul>
        <li> Partial implementation of the Microsoft Installer (msi.dll).</li>
        <li> GUI for regedit (from ReactOS).</li>
        <li> DirectMusic dlls reorganization.</li>
        <li> Many Wininet improvements.</li>
         <li> Lots of bug fixes.</li></ul></p></quote>

<p>Go forth, 
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241">download</a>, and compile.</p>

At one time I subscribed to just about every Linux
magazine out there. As a sys admin it was a necessary 
part of my job. Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, Sys Admin,
even PC Magazine were required reading. I left that 
world though and for the most part I don't read those
any more. In fact, I find a lot of it fairly boring now.
(I also think the articles in Sys Admin have gone downhill
a bit, but that's another story.) Perhaps I've just gotten
better at separating the crap articles from the truly useful
ones and can read everything I want in ten minutes at the
bookstore.

That's exactly what I was doing the other day when I ran
across <a href="http://www.linuxformat.co.uk">Linux Format</a>.
I've seen it before on the shelves but always hesitated to buy it -
I'm always wary of magazine skrinkwrapped in plastic with a CD
full of software I've never heard of. Especially when it's an
import magazine (Linux Format is British) and costs $13.95.
The headline on the front on the front caught my attention though: 
"Use Wine To Run Windows Software".

Wow. Needless to say I'm quite impressed with it. The Wine
articles were a decent introduction to the project. They contained
multi-page sections on CodeWeavers and TransGaming. Also scattered
throughout the magazine and it's supplement were quotes and other
references to Wine.
But what really caught my attention was the quality of each article.
They were timely and provided information for both home
users, IT managers, and developers. The page layout is excellent;
chock full of nice graphics and loaded with screenshots. It came with
a bunch of CD's, one of which has the word "Wine" on it. I haven't had
a chance to check it out yet. Unfortunately
a subscription for North American readers is a little pricey - over $100.
If you happen to be in the bookstore, and an article on the cover catches
your eye, I highly recommend purchasing it - from what I've seen it'll
be worth it.

Oh, and before anyone says anything, I did notice some of the details
on Wine development was wrong. I don't think it's worth nitpicking
though.

Jeremy Newman attended LinuxWorld last week, so you may have noticed
the last WWN issue arrived a few days late. Just a reminder 
you can always find the
same content at both Zack Brown's Kernel/Traffic /
<a href="http://www.kerneltraffic.org/wine">Wine Traffic</a> and
<a href="http://www.winehq.com">WineHQ</a>. One may appear before the
other depending on the schedules of Zack and Jeremy.

We posted our 11th interview with Wine developers early this
week. <a href="http://www.winehq.com/?interview=11">Francois Gouget</a> 
discussed a broad variety of topics
including Wine's conformance suite and how to attract new developers.

<p>Google scares me.  Wine Traffic issue #182 was posted last 
Friday and I discovered on Monday it was already indexed. 
</p>
</section>
<section 
	title="BiDi Test Program" 
	subject="bidi support test program"
	archive="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/0175.html" 
	posts="1"
	startdate="08/12/2003"
>
<topic>Internationalization</topic>
<topic>Utilities</topic>
<p>Shachar Shemesh posted a message for packagers or other folks
interested in BiDi support:</p>
<quote who="Shachar Shemesh"><p>

<a href="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/att-0175/01-biditest.c">Attached</a>
 is a simple program to test whether the Win32 API supports BiDi 
reordering. Some packagers asked me for such a utility in the past, so 
they can make sure that their inclusion of ICU worked, and without 
forcing them to actually understand languages that are all Hebrew to them.

I'm not sure whether it would be necessary to include this utility 
inside the Wine soure, or how to do so. This is not exactly a test, as a 
failure is totally justified under some circumstances.

</p></quote>

</section>
<section 
	title="Configuring Keyboard Layouts" 
	subject="wrong keyboard layout"
	archive="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/0151.html" 
	posts="20"
	startdate="08/09/2003"
	enddate="08/13/2003"
>
<topic>Internationalization</topic>
<p>Raul (last name unknown) asked,
<quote who="Raul">
couple years ago, when i sent the estonian layout patch, worked fine
put now im using redhat 9 and detects wrong layout (Latin American 
keyboard layout)
is there some changes that breaks the layout or im making something wrong?
</quote></p>

Dmitry Timoshkov felt the problem was elsewhere:
<quote who="Dmitry Timoshkov">
The changes have been made on the XFree86 side, not in Wine. It seems
that XFree86 guys have corrected all their keyboard layouts to have
no more than 2 keysyms per keycode in the single layout. As far as I can
track it down that work was started for 4.2.x and with 4.3.0 (almost?) all
keyboard layouts in XFree86 were fixed.

BTW, what wrong happens if your keyboard was misdetected? In the current
CVS all national characters should work fine regardless what keyboard
layout was detected. Is that only a warning message which makes you worry?
</quote>

That prompted Shachar Shemesh to ask,
<quote who="Shachar Shemesh">
Does this also apply to UTF-8? I, for one, still can't get any 
characters recognized when the locale is UTF-8.
</quote>

After some debugging, Shachar posted again,
<quote who="Shachar Shemesh">
After some messing around, and kind help from Dimitry, the problem was 
that my locale was not set correctly. Setting the locale to en_US.UTF-8 
(with the dash, and in upper case) works with both wine and xev. Any 
other combination (utf8, UTF8, etc.) works with konsole, openoffice, 
kedit, and just about any other program I tested, but not with wine and 
xev. You live and you learn, obviously.
</quote>

Phil Krylov also ran into some problems and reported some
settings that worked better for him,
<quote who="Phil Krylov">
 Ah, it must be my fault - I used LANG instead of LC_ALL. Using
 LC_ALL=ru_RU.UTF-8 and your latest patch (ignoring XK_ModeSwitch), my
 keyboard started working perfectly.
</quote>

He then corrected himself and mentioned it was ru_RU.KOI8-R 
that worked. It seems there was a problem with UTF-8 and Dmitry
felt X was to blame,
<quote who="Dmitry Timoshkov">
It must be a bug in the XmbLookupString implementation of XFree86. It
seems that it doesn't respect UTF-8 locale, while works fine in others.
</quote>
He went on to explain,
<quote who="Dmitry Timoshkov">
XFree86 uses C locale, not UTF-8 one. As I wrote previously, test with
'xev' first. As soon as it starts to work, Wine should work as well.
</quote>

Shachar wanted to know why everything else would work fine with
the wrong locale while Wine didn't. Dmitry pointed out the difference:
<quote who="Dmitry Timoshkov">
Okay I'll repeat: because everything else is using their own toolkits
while xev and Wine talk directly to X Server using raw X11 protocol.
It means that Wine *depends* on the correctly configured XFree86 and
just can't compensate if XFree86 fails to work in the particular locale.
</quote>

</section>
<section 
	title="RedHat 7.3 RPMs"
	subject="Re: RPM for Red Hat 7.3"
	archive="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/0253.html" 
	posts="3"
	startdate="08/14/2003"
>
<topic>Build Process</topic>
<p>Matt Seitz wanted to know how he could go about getting 
a recent RPM for RedHat 7.3.  Vincent Beron, the RedHat packager,
had a hard drive crash that prevented him from having a usable
RH 7.3 system. He suggested building it from source:
</p>
<quote who="Vincent Beron"><p>

If you're willing to put your hands at it, you can begin by downloading
the RH8 SRPM and rebuilding it (ideally after changing the extraversion
to something else). I can't think of something going wrong, except if
RH7.3 doesn't have the necessary version of some build tools (autoconf,
gcc, etc.). If something goes wrong, try to investigate and fix it
(obviously). I can't recall something possibly causing problem though.

</p></quote>

</section>
<section 
        title="Feature: Wine History"
        subject="Wine history draft"
        archive="http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wine-devel/2003/08/0092.html"
        posts="3"
        startdate="08/06/2003"            
>
<topic>Documentation</topic>
<p>I apologize for how short this week's issue is.  I've been rather
busy this week.  Several threads were almost included, but they didn't
really seem to have a lot of appeal outside of a few developers.
This is a good time to put in a special feature section.  It's been
years since a "Feature" article was included in the Wine Weekly
News.  I've been working on a short history of Wine for the website
and it's almost done.  Consider this an almost completed draft:</p>
<quote who="Brian Vincent">

<p>
Wine's roots can be traced back to 1993.  At the time several forces were
converging that made running Windows applications appealing.  Microsoft had
successfully steered it's Windows program to the forefront of personal
computers.  IBM had hopes that OS/2 would catch on, but even they admitted
that support of Windows programs was necessary and built the ability into
their product.  The free software movement spawned in the eighties was
rapidly
gaining ground as people discovered it was possible to run a multiuser,
multitasking operating system on a PC.
</p><p>
Sun's acquisition of Praxsys Technologies in September of 1992 led to the
development of a product called Wabi.  Sun first demonstrated the
software at the 1993 Solaris Developers Conference.  It allowed users of
Solaris x86 and Solaris 2.2 for SPARC to run Windows applications out of the
box. Other products at the time allowed Windows programs to be run, but they
required machine-level emulation and the installation of DOS and Windows.
Wabi was unique in that it allowed Windows windowing calls to be translated
directly to X Windows calls.  By emulating the rest of the x86 code it was
possible to actually run Windows programs faster on a RISC workstation!
Wabi's more advanced features included Bitstream's font handling technology
to handle TrueType fonts.
</p><p>
Users of the upstart Linux operating system began discussing the possibility
of a similar approach in June of 1993.  At the time, the chances of Wabi
being
ported to Linux were slim to none.  A mailing list was set up to facilitate
discussion.  The name "Wine" was quickly adopted.  Several of the early
developers included some of the first Linux kernel hackers including Eric
Youngdale and David Metcalfe.  Other recognizable names included Alexandre
Julliard who now leads Wine and Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame.  Bob Amstadt
headed the development.
</p><p>
Initial work consisted of getting a program loader working that could run
Windows' 16-bit binaries.  That work was primarily headed by Bob.
Alexandre's involvement centered around merging windowing functions written
by Peter MacDonald in Tcl/Tk.  Progress moved along quickly, and within
the first 6 months it was possible to run Solitaire.  November of 1993 also
saw the first port of Wine to another architecture - John Brezak submitted
patches to allow Wine to run on NetBSD.  Bob estimated that with the current
rate of development the team was six months to a year away from release.
Ironically, Wine continued to be six months to a year from release for the
next decade.
</p><p>
Early communication between developers took many forms, including the
linux-kernel mailing list.  The very first Wine mailing list was operated
by Robert to allow discussions between developers.  After a year with many
successes and growing interest in the project they asked for the creation
of the newsgroup comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine.  The vote was
overwhelmingly
in favor of its creation and it became part of the Usenet hierarchy on
July 19th, 1994.  The current mailing lists where most development is
discussed were created by Doug Ridgway in October, 1998.  
</p><p>
The early years saw many changes to Wine's development.  Robert stepped
down in 1994 and Alexandre took over development.  Windowing was rewritten
as straight Xlib calls.  Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft began releasing
32-bit code and adding new functionality to their operating systems.  It
was no longer enough to just load code and run it, a tighter integration
was needed with the underlying operating systems (primarily Linux.) Mechanisms 
needed
to be added that supported network connections and registry files.  Wine's
architecture had relied on a shared address space between applications.
Gradually it became clear that address space separation was needed to
increase security and support shared libraries trying to access the same
space.  Work commenced in early 2000 and continues to this day.
</p>
<p>Alexandre recalled some of the early milestones for Wine in a keynote
he gave at Wineconf:
<ul><li>May 1995: beginnings of Win32 support</li>
 <li>July 1995: switch to autoconf</li>
 <li>January 1996: Word and Excel reported to run</li>
 <li>November 1997: Creation of winehq.com web site</li>
</ul></p> 
<p>
Volunteers began contributing to aspects other than programming.  John
Sheets and Susan Farley worked on some of the original documentation.  
Doug Ridgway set up the <a href="http://www.winehq.com">WineHQ</a> web
site in 1997.  The site was taken over by Corel for a few years, and
then CodeWeavers took it over from them in March, 2002.  Jeremy Newman
now serves as the webmaster.  
The <a href="http://www.winehq.com/news">Wine Weekly News</a> first
appeared on the web site in 1999.  Originally authored by Eric Pouech, 
Brian Vincent took over in 2001.   Over the past few years several
features have been added to the web site.  A redesign in early 2003
added several pages to help new users get acquainted with Wine, project
lists for developers to think about, and a large list of frequently
asked questions.
</p><p>
In 1998 a strategic decision was made by Corel to wholeheartedly support
Linux.  The key elements were centered around providing a Linux-based system 
that was both simple to install and easy to use.  To this end, they sought to 
provide both a Linux based distribution and support for their applications.
Corel's suite of office programs demanded a high level of Wine sophistication.  
For the first time in Wine history commercial development was funding it's
development.  Corel maintained a great relationship with Wine, partly due to
the involvement of another company doing a lot of the work - CodeWeavers.
</p><p>
The bubble soon burst.  Rumors began circulating at the end of 2000
that Corel would discontinue it's support for Linux.  By early 2001 Corel
officially announced it would spin off it's Linux division.  Their support
for work on Wine ended.
</p><p>
It wasn't long before others joined in to fill the void.  By this time
Alexandre had already taken a position with CodeWeavers doing much of the
low level work on Wine.  CodeWeavers had gotten involved with Wine in
1999 and were contracted by Corel to improve parts of Wine that would
benefit Corel's applications.  CodeWeavers began developing their own products
and putting a lot of polish on Wine.  Their own version of Wine included
graphical management tools and an easy setup.  Several distributions
made it available for download.  Their first product, CrossOver
Plugin, allowed Linux users to run Netscape plugins designed for Windows.
Newer versions of the product have added support for even more plugins.
They released CrossOver Office in March, 2002 to provide support for
office applications like Excel and Lotus Notes.
</p><p>
TransGaming formed in August of 2001.  Gavriel State, who  had been with
Corel, left and formed his own company.  Newer PC games had been
focusing on Microsoft's DirectX interfaces for everything from input
devices to 3D acceleration.
By tying it to their operating systems it made porting games to different
platforms very difficult.  DirectX support in Wine was first added by
Marcus Meissner in 1997 and was very limited.  Gav
sought to commercialize the development of it and create a new version
of Wine designed for gamers.  More technologies than just DirectX were 
needed and some of the early work focused on including support
for copy protection measures.  WineX 1.0 was released in October of 2001
with support for six games.
</p>
<p>Also in 2001 another company announced intentions to work with Wine.
Lindows.com wanted to create a Linux distribution that was simple to use
and let users run Windows programs.  It wasn't long before they abandoned
the idea in favor of native Linux applications.  Before that happened 
they sponsored Wineconf - a three day event in March,2002 that brought 
together developers from around the world.  To make matters more interesting,
on the eve of the conference the Wine community had concluded another 
licensing <s>flamewar</s> discussion.</p>
<p>
Wine's storied history of licensing has sparked many debates.  The issue of
licensing surrounds itself with two primary areas - the license of the Wine
code itself and the license of applications produced using Winelib.  The
Wine
developers' goal is to give people the ability to both implement and add to
the Wine project in such a way it doesn't hinder others from doing the same.
At the same time they want to give other developers the chance to port their
application without the fear of being bound to a software license that
prevents
them from doing what they want with their creation.
</p><p>
In the beginning, Wine adopted a BSD-style license.  At
the end of 1999 discussion began about changing the license.  Richard
Stallman had pointed out that it was incompatible with the GPL which
potentially causes problems with any open source project wishing to use
Wine code.  Most developers didn't see a need to craft a new license and
the X11 license, a derivative
of the BSD license, had the most support.  A vote was called for and in 
January of 2000 Alexandre announced that it would become the new license 
of Wine.
</p><p>
In March of 2002 a poll was conducted among both the free and commercial
developers of Wine to see if there was interest in moving to a different
license.  Most developers did not want their code to be appropriated by a
commercial entity and there were concerns that might happen.  After much
debate they chose the Lesser General Public
License and on March 9th, 2002 the Wine source code became bound to those
terms.  The LGPL, often referred to as a "copyleft" license, required the
Wine
developers to abide by some guidelines:
<ul>
  <li>All changes to the source code must be made available</li>
  <li>Anyone redistributing Wine must provide access to the source code
under the
    original terms of the LGPL</li>
  <li>However, anyone who wishes to simply "link" their own Windows program
to Wine
    can do so without having to make their source code available.</li>
</ul></p><p>
The immediate effect was the creation of the ReWind
(http://rewind.sourceforge.net ) project to further the X11-licensed
codebase.
Many key developers agreed to allow their additions to be used by both the
X11
and LGPL Wine code.  Some have decided to focus their efforts on
synchronizing
with ReWind and others with the LGPL'ed Wine.
Picking a favorite software license is left as an exercise for the reader.
</p>
<p>Wine has grown to over 1.4 million lines of C code over the past
decade.  Nearly 600 people have contributed in some fashion.  As always,
you can expect Wine to be released sometime this year; or maybe early
next year.  Or perhaps we'll just wait for <i>you</i> to become involved
and finish those important user interface and documentation bits.</p> 
</quote>
<p>Comments and criticism are welcome, my email address is 
vinn -at- theshell.com.  I'm also looking for some help to go through
old Usernet archives and pull out some quotes.  </p>
</section></kc>