[Wine] Never had an app work in WINE

[David Gerard]

On 4 March 2010 21:35, James Mckenzie <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> ttsec <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
>>atalaras wrote:

>>> I have actually seen applications regress. Firefox used to run perfectly, almost, now it wont run at all.
>>> Again the developers do not seem to care.
>>> I have made repeated requests here for help with firefox, and nothing. How could wine go from running Firefox perfectly to it being completely unusable?

>>Spending time on specific softwares that can already run natively in Linux is a waste of time.

> Not necessarily.  Firefox is an application that is used to monitor how well Wine works.  If it broke, then we (developers) need to know where the breakage is at.  That is why we request a regression test between when the breakage was noticed and the verision that worked.  The problem could be a small fix for something else that broke Firefox.  Also, the breakage could be something that the Firefox team did and thus the Wine project has no control over this.


Yes. And Wine aims to eventually run all Windows software, after all -
and Firefox is popular Windows software, so it *should* run, and it's
open source so the devs have access to the code.

(That said, open source apps tend to be a lot better-written than
proprietary ones, so tend to work better in general on Wine ...)

The thing is not just to say "Firefox doesn't work, you suck!" but
"Firefox doesn't work, regression testing shows this change broke it"
and file a bug. That *will* get attention and get fixed.

If you were using a commercially-supported version of Wine, such as
CrossOver, you could say "it doesn't work as of version x" and they'd
track it down. For the open source version, the devs do fix stuff, but
you need to meet them half way :-)


- d.