[Wine] Re: I need to make some comment on WineTools

[Jörg Schaible]

Hi James,

James Hawkins wrote:

> 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.

Well, without WineTools I would have never been able to install "WISO Mein
Geld 2005" a very popular German financial program, that does not have any
real equivalent for Linux. Still running wine-20050310. Unfortunately the
last online update of the communication part breaks the app and I will get
always an OLE error.

[snip] 

>> 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.

So, this is interesting. Where do I get such information? See, I tried to
install "WISO Mein Geld 2006" - the new version of this financial app -
without success for some time now. As the last version it is based on the
IE control and uses also .NET 1.1 functionality. I tried with WineTools on
0.9.4 and 0.9.9. While I can install at least IE with 0.9.4, the
installation fails with 0.9.9 completely. I also tried to install IE on a
plain 0.9.9 manually, but did not get further as WineTools.

The problem is, even if I use a plain 0.9.9 with the installer for my app,
the first thing it detects is a missing IE6sp1 and tries to install it on
its own. Fortunately the main installation continues even if the IE6
installation crashes (ensuring that I continue on my own risk), but crashes
again in the next step.

> 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.

This is nice to hear, but without your posting I would have never even tried
to install my app without installing IE6 first. If you don't want your
users to use tools such as WineTools, at least I need more information,
what I can expect to be present and what I need as a base setup for most of
the apps. This includes:

- DCOM98
- IE
- MsiInstaller
- MDAC / Jet
- MSXML
- HTML Help
- Common Controls
- MFC

Without knowing the basic environment I present my app at installation, I
waste a lot of time just because I am totally unsure what might be the case
for the failing setup process.

- Jörg