State of wine (was Re: web pages not shown with Internet Explorer 6 IE6 on RedHat 9)

[marthter]

Fabian Cenedese wrote  on 27/04/04 02:26 AM:

>>What DID work, however, was to take the warning seriously on the install-ie6.sh page, namely that it ONLY works with wine-20031212, and ONLY built from source.  So here is what I did:
>>    
>>
>As you now have a working version and know that other versions don't work
>you may apply patches until it doesn't work anymore and find out what
>broke wine. You can always go back to wine-20031212 if you do serious
>work :)
>
>bye  Fabi
>
Yes, it would be great if I could spend all week getting to the bottom 
of this.  But spending 3 days just to get this far, and then finding 
that Wine crashes a few pages further in to the business critical site 
that I need to access, has left me a bit discouraged.

For now I will have to just transfer my win98 from another old machine 
and dual boot this one.

My own opinion as a software developer, is that the Wine team seems to 
be spread too thin.  Why has IE been broken since 20031212?  It might be 
more manageable if they focus on one version of windows (say win98), and 
they should pick a few applications against which they measure 
regression before every commit (or at least before every release).  
(Naturally I would hope ie6setup.exe and iexplore.exe were some of the 
applications tested for regression, but I am biased.)

Also, the black magic of incantations in DllOverrides seems to throw too 
many variables into the mix at a time.  I've read hundreds of these 
mailing list articles, and people just say "use these, it worked for me" 
but they don't even tell you if that is based on a no-windows install or 
they have a real windows partition to get some dlls from.  So you have 
no idea if their "help" applies to your case.

Could some knowledgeable Wine developer write a document on how to 
troubleshoot Wine?  As it is, there is no clear line between what is 
caused by a Wine bug (or unfinished feature), and what is caused by 
incorrect DllOverrides.  The goal of the document would be to handle all 
users in a predictable, reproducible way: Suppose you start from a clean 
Wine install, and run program X, if you see error Y, you should make 
this ONE change in your config and it should allow you to get past that 
error, and if it doesn't then file it as a bug.  If you get a little 
further, but you hit error Z, make this other change... Etc.  Etc.

As it is, the majority of all the help that is out there consists of 
"make these 50 changes, it worked for me" and when you try it and it 
doesn't work, you can't even tell if the new error is happening earlier 
or later than the old error that you were trying to get rid of.

I don't envy the task of the Wine developers, and I have to tip my hat 
to them for bringing it this far.  But I have to say, the screen shot of 
IE working in Wine really got my hopes up that this would solve my 
dilemma (of needing IE for a specific web site), and it has been a big 
let down that IE certainly did not work "out of the box" (from the 
latest RPM), and is only part-working after days of fiddling, and that 
part is not enough of the whole to get my critical web work done.  If it 
had been days of fiddling and it eventually WORKED, that would have been 
an okay investment of time.  But to have days of fiddling and to still 
hit a wall, feels like a bad investment of time.

Keep on truckin; I will be checking back with each release to see if the 
regression unregresses.

Regards.

Martin