FAQ: Will Wine duplicate all of the functions of MS Windows?

[Francois Gouget]

Changelog:

 * documentation/faq.sgml

   Be more explicit when describing what belongs in Wine (API) and what
does not belong in Wine (drivers, Windows applets, window managers,
etc.).
   Also point to projects where such contributions would be more
appropriate.


Index: documentation/faq.sgml
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/wine/wine/documentation/faq.sgml,v
retrieving revision 1.13
diff -u -r1.13 faq.sgml
--- documentation/faq.sgml	28 Jul 2003 19:06:10 -0000	1.13
+++ documentation/faq.sgml	20 Aug 2003 20:24:25 -0000
@@ -805,10 +916,38 @@
       </question>
       <answer>
         <para>
-          Most of them, yes. However, some applications and applets that come
-          with MS Windows, such as File Manager and Calculator, can be
-          considered by some to be redundant, since 32-bit UNIX programs that
-          duplicate these applets' functions already exist.
+          Wine's goal is to make it possible to run Windows applications on
+          Unix. To this end it will provide replacements for just those
+          DLLs and APIs that are needed by these Windows applications.
+          This means that Wine will not provide replacements for DLLs that
+          are not shipped with Windows or are always shipped with Windows
+          application (e.g. the Visual Basic runtime). This also
+          means that implementing an API that no application ever uses is not
+          a priority. Similarly, until there are applications out there that
+          use the Win64 API, it will not be a priority. That being said,
+          we will certainly try to keep our options open and to improve our API
+          coverage as we can.
+        </para>
+        <para>
+          Also Wine is not an operating system, so that writing device
+          drivers is not part of Wine's goals. However if you are interested
+          in device drivers, the <ulink url="http://www.kernel.org/">Linux</>,
+          <ulink url="http://www.freebsd.org/">FreeBSD</> and
+          <ulink url="http://www.reactos.com/">ReactOS</> kernel developpers
+          would certainly appreciate your contribution.
+        </para>
+        <para>
+          Similarly Wine does not try to be a desktop environment so
+          providing applets such as a calculator, a file manager or even
+          window manager that look like Windows, are low priority or would
+          even best be done as a separate project. Such projects would also
+          to a large extant be redundant with other open-source projects.
+          Again, there are projects that would certainly appreciate your
+          contributions in this areas, such as the
+          <ulink url="http://www.gnome.org/">Gnome</> or
+          <ulink url="http://www.kde.org/">KDE</> desktop environments. You
+          will get the added benefit that your contribution will then be
+          usable by everyone, not just by Wine users.
         </para>
       </answer>
       </qandaentry>



-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  A black hole is just God dividing by zero.