[Wine] I need to make some comment on WineTools

[James Hawkins]

On 3/3/06, Philip V. Neves <pneves at telus.net> wrote:
> I just red the article on the website about winetools.  This is
> controversy is a non starter in my oppinion. I believe that something
> like winetools should be included in the wine distribution to begin
> with.  It should be something under the control of the developers
> themselves and bug reports should be added to fix any problems. Why did
> it take someone outside of the wine development team to do this. For the
> average user we don't want to have to make a gazillion changes in
> winecfg. You guys are always adding new features or making changes. I
> want to just get something going not get stopped at the door by a huge
> barrier to entry.
>

If you had read both sides of the debate properly, you wouldn't be
asking this question.  While we the developers always want to give the
user a more enjoyable experience, things like winetools and sidenet
are not the right way to go about it.  winetools and sidenet install
applications by using native dll overrides, thus preventing wine's
builtin dlls from being used.  If our builtin dlls aren't being used,
then we don't get the proper feedback and bug reports that help us
make our implementation better.  An app like winetools will never be
incorporated into wine, and that is agreed upon by the developer's of
both wine and winetools.

> If the development team had such a tool it could make test releases and
> production releases. The production release would have the right
> combination of native libraries and windows DLLs installed to get things
> going.  While the test release would be used for people who want to
> test. I think this would be an excellent compromise here. This way the
> development of winetools and wine will go in the right direction to a
> final working system.
>

This system might be beneficial to winetools, but it would only hurt
the development of wine.

> Furthermore.... IE is a necessary part of windows now. Functionality for
> it needs to be in wine. Its not something that can be disgarded or
> ignored. Allot of applications use IEs DLL's and functionality these
> days. So its intrinsically part of the windows API.  You won't get 100%
> compatibility without the functionality it offers.
>

You don't have to install native IE to get this funcionality.  Jacek
Caban is doing a great job implementing the underlying libraries of
IE, the libraries that are required by many apps.  While it's not yet
complete, we are working towards 100% compatibility.

--
James Hawkins