[Wine] Windows Kernel & Executive implementation

[James Hawkins]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday 23 February 2008, Dan Kegel wrote:
>  > On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Alan McKinnon
>  <alan.mckinnon at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > >  For example, there is no sane reason in the world that VC++ should
>  > >  always work under Wine, considering the deep knowledge of Windows
>  > > that is built into VC++.
>  >
>  > I don't think that's a good example.  While I agree that
>  > Wine is not designed to run ALL windows software
>  > (it'll never run arbitrary VxD's, for instance), it can and
>  > will run Visual C++.   Visual C++ 6 works quite well modulo
>  > one bug in ole32, and Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 installs and
>  > runs pretty well module two bugs keeping .net 1.1 from installing.
>  > Visual C++ 6 and 2003 will eventually work well enough to make
>  > Windows developers comfortable.  And valgrind will support windows
>  > apps well enough that Windows developers might... actually...
>  > prefer... to develop their Windows apps on Linux sometimes.
>
>  Maybe it is a bad example, it's the first one I pulled out of my head.
>
>  But really, why would one compile something for Windows on Wine?

Because he doesn't want to use Windows yet he has to use Visual Studio?

>  I can
>  see that some OSS Windows apps might need a bit of tweaking and
>  recompiling to run better on a specific setup, but to do that
>  legitimately you'd need a valid license for the dev tools. Such a
>  person would also have a Windows machine to hand surely?
>

Not surely at all.  Anyone can acquire Visual Studio without having or
getting Windows.

>  It's also a handy way for a Wine dev to check that bits of Wine are
>  working correctly, but is it really that useful in the general case, is
>  it something that regular users would do and does it warrant an
>  especially high priority?
>
>  There's also the legal issue. Yes I know this isn't a nice topic but it
>  has to be confronted at some point. Do the MS dev tools permit
>  installation and running on a non-MS platform? That might have been
>  something not explicitly stated in older licenses, but I'll bet it's
>  certainly not the case with the dev stuff MS released just this week
>  for example.
>
>  I must admit thought that it would be cool to support things like
>  compilers and get a better more efficient result than MS can <evil
>  grin>. That kind of technical expertise impresses me greatly but we do
>  have to stay within reasonable limits
>

If you're referring to Visual Studio again, as Dan already stated, it
works pretty well and there aren't many issues left to fix.  They're
certainly within reasonable limits.

-- 
James Hawkins