[Wine] For Vitamin Only

[Martin Gregorie]

On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 03:48 -0600, pswamis80 wrote:
> my Problem is :- 
> I am last year Computer Engineering student & I want to study
> WINE(only for 32 bit OS) as my BE project. I have downloaded the wine
> source code & I have wine user & developer guide also.
>
Luxury!  In the Real World (TM) its normal to have to understand a big,
old program from just the source and to do it under time pressure so you
can make and test changes that are wanted 'right now' in the live
system. Such programs often don't have the tracing facilities that Wine
provides.

Real World example from some time back: I arrive first morning on a new
job as sysadmin on the George 3 OS and am told that the job accounting
system is falling over on one user's jobs, which prevents any job
accounting from being done so its a critical error. Its an assembler
program I've never needed to look at before and its only documentation
is a manpage. I also had the log of the job in question. No core dump
and no diagnostics are produced: the program reduced its size to 64
words and quit, which was the equivalent of a segfault on that OS. I had
a work-round running by 10pm that night. 

Any competent programmer should know how to do the same.

> But I'm confused that from where to start studying wine exactly? I
> have knowledge of programming languages also my OS concepts are also
> good. 
> 
I'd start by finding and reading main() in the source for the wine
executable because that probably starts and stops everything else
including the wineserver. Depending on how easy that was to follow I
might also write some simple Windows program, e.g. Hello World or a VB
program that pops up a dialogue box, compile it and when its debugged
under Windows, run it under wine with all tracing enabled to get a feel
for the way things work.


Martin