[Wine] Running custom Delphi 5 based software under Wine

[Paul Romanyszyn]

On 09/28/2013 05:55 PM, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> I'm thinking of “porting” an in-house legacy software to Wine. The
> software is developed with Delphi 5 and relies on BDE with Firebird.
> Because Delphi 5 and its respective libraries are proprietary I can't
> check whether all APIs the software uses are implemented Wine and thus
> need a better method to test the software for Wine compatibility,
> because the software would have to run reliably under Wine. Has anyone
> ported Delphi based software to Wine?
>
> Automated system testing is the best method I could think, but requires
> a lot of effort (Unit testing and integration testing are mostly
> impossible, because the software is, expect for third-party and some
> utility components, not modular and contains a lot of business logic in
> methods of the user interface). Which user interface testing software
> works reliably under Wine (I had a look at [1], but it seems outdated)?
>
> Regards,
> Matthias-Christian
>
> [1] http://kegel.com/wine/testsw.html
>
>
I have been doing internal projects with Delphi 1,3 and 5 under Wine 
since XP was released. Most of the stubbed API's are not an issue with 
the basic functionally. I have switched to Lazarus for new stuff and 
ported some of the simpler ones without too much of an issue.

Don't port just run the win exe's under the latest wine. Testing each 
and every code path will be the challenge.
I have see one BDE issue that I am not sure if it Wine or that is the 
way BDE works. If I modify records and save the disk files don't get 
updated until the program closes. If the program crashes the data is 
never sent to the disk. This app is a D1 16 app with BDE and 
dbase/paradox database files.
Paul