Porting with Winelib

[eric pouech]

> 1. Can I use Winelib to port commercial application
>      whose sources will be not disclosed ?
yes. Wine is developped under a X11 like licence which allows that

> 2. Is it possible to link Winelib statically with an application and distribute it ?
it has been possible at some point in the past, but because of the ways
DLLs are handled
now it's now longer in the main tree (and main become a bit difficult to
handle)
furthermore, it's a bad idea if any ported app from windows has to have
it's bundled
Wine image, it'll eat lots of memory (disk, RAM...)

> 3. In case that I don't use Winelib and use Wine instead
>     to provide commercial application,
>     can we include Wine with the application to distribute ?
yup (or I don't see any reasons not to do so)

> 4. Does porting with Winelib still need to compile MFC ?
>     libmfc42.so still doesn't work ?
well, either you distribute the native mfc (which should work), or you
recompile
native MFC for linux. Since, this is a derivate work from the MS folks,
it cannot
be included with the wine tree. However, some folks are still working on
it

> 5. Can Winelib deal with other languages besides English
>      such as Japanese and German ?
Wine is designed to mimic Windows behavior and support (at least on the
API level)
both ansi (including various code pages) and unicode versions. So, it
shouldn't be
an issue. Most built-in DLLs come with their resources in several
languages

> 6. How is printing ? Can we print from ported application like Windows ?
yes. support has been recently greatly improved (both the postscript
driver and
a driver to connect to the CUPS system, which hides all the complexity
of the
printer configuration)

> 7. Is the license condition of Winelib is as same as the one of Wine ?
yes. both are distributed under the same licence

> 8. It might be a problem compiling MFC on Linux and
>     distributing it with an application
>     because of MS's MFC license condition, right ?
>     But there are companies have already ported their applications with Winelib.
>     How did they avoid this type of problems ?
well. They shouldn't have used MFC ;-)

> 9. Though I think I have read most of part in winehq.com and
>     have checked newsgroups using groups.google.com,
>     if there are good information about porting by Winelib I'd like to know.
well, read the code Luke! specmaker (from the CVS tree) might be the
best way to 
start

> 10. Is there good way to provide Help system
>        with ported application like Widows Help ?
windows help used to work (even if 32 bit version had some trouble)

anyway, if you consider doing serious porting job with Wine, I'd advise
posting to wine-devel at winehq.com where you might the best technical
answers

A+
-- 
---------------
Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/)
"The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle