1 Mar
2001
1 Mar
'01
4:44 p.m.
please find enclosed the latest WWN issue A+
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Eric Pouech (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/eric.pouech/)
"The future will be better tomorrow", Vice President Dan Quayle
Wine Weekly News
All the News that Fits, we print.
Events, progress, and happenings in the Wine community for February
26, 2001 .
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Discussions on wine-devel
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This week, 67 posts consumed 246 K. There were 32 different
contributors, 12 (37%) posted more than once, and 14 (43%) posted
last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
* 9 posts in 20 K by "Ove Kaaven" ovehk@ping.uio.no
* 6 posts in 26 K by Eric Pouech Eric.Pouech@wanadoo.fr
* 6 posts in 23 K by "Alexandre Julliard" julliard@winehq.com
* 5 posts in 28 K by Ian Pilcher pilcher@concentric.net
* 4 posts in 12 K by FT Rathore mawali@news.icns.com
* 3 posts in 7 K by Gerald Pfeifer pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at
* 3 posts in 10 K by Andreas Mohr a.mohr@mailto.de
* 3 posts in 0 K by Robert O'Callahan roc+@cs.cmu.edu
* 2 posts in 7 K by "Patrik Stridvall" ps@leissner.se
* 2 posts in 6 K by gerard patel gerard.patel@asi.fr
* 2 posts in 5 K by David.Goodenough@dga.co.uk
* 2 posts in 23 K by Martin Pilka mpilka@codeweavers.com
local IP and registry Issue
Alan Chandler wrote: "I spent most of the weekend trying to get Grand
Prix Legends GPL to work. I achieved my first goal of getting it to
run in server mode.
One of the things I needed to get the game to do, was to recognize
that there where some interfaces it could talk TCP/IP out of. It took
me some time to realize that under windows it was doing this by
looking for the key
[System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\NetTrans] and was then
enumerating the keys under it to establish an IP address ie the
following:
[System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\NetTrans\0000]
"IPAddress"="10.0.10.100"
The thought occurred to me that maybe the tool the builds the registry
during wine install could actually create these keys - since it is
essentially a key part of the system (and other similar keys are also
built in the same way).
"
Ove Kaaven agreed on the utility of the key itself, but noted that
"the IP address can change between Wine invocations (PPP, DHCP, and
things like that), so it would have to be a dynamic key, generated at
Wine startup or something like that."
There is already some keys which are dynamically generated (like the
processor information - Pentium, stepping... - or copying the contents
of the init files into Wine specific registry keys to ease the reading
of those configuration afterwards), so the approach could be extended.
However, Ove wondered how the network interfaces could be gotten from
the OS in a portable way ? There hasn't been any answer so far.
Setting up a Wine's test harness Evolution
John Sturtz (re)-opened the long awaited issue of bringing up a test
harness for Wine (and its implementation of the Windows API).
I work for CodeWeavers here in St Paul. Awhile back, I was set to the
task of working on winetest, a Wine application which provided a
flex/bison-based parser for a little scripting language from which
Wine API functions could be called. The idea was that one could
write test scripts which would call Wine API functions and examine
the results, and the scripts could be used for regression testing
of Wine.
The scripting language began life with a rather Perl-ish syntax,
and as functionality got added, it got more so. Eventually (about
the time I had implemented a pack function, and wanted an unpack),
I decided to see if I could write a Perl extension that provided a
gateway for calling Wine API functions. That way, scripts for
regression testing could be written directly in Perl instead.
John then provided a first implementation of this (you can find it at
[1]ftp://wine.codeweavers.com/pub/other/perlwine.tar.gz).
Basically, what you can do with this is invoke some tests like:
$atom = kernel32->GlobalAddAtomA("bark");
Joshua Thielen pointed out that some existing Perl modules for Win32
(from the [2]ActiveState site) allowed to provide the same interface
as John's work (which was Linux based only). Alan Gonzalez also noted
that this "will work out of the box on cygwin for windows using the
perl 5.6.1 that is bundled with it." Jeremy White then started to
figure out what the test harness should contain: "I think it would be
great if we could start to define (and build) a test harness. I think
that there are a lot of people who would help write test scripts, who
might otherwise be unable to help with Wine development. The more the
merrier, I always say... "
Jeremy started to split out the test cases into two categories:
* non-interactive: no user interaction is needed
* interactive: user interaction is needed
As already covered (see [3]this article ), a free test tool for X11
regression test has not been found yet, making the second category a
bit difficult to run.
Eric Pouech proposed to have a two pass approach to run the test.
First the test case is run and outputs some results which are stored
into a file. Then, the contents of this file is compared against a
reference file.
This would allow, beyond the simple regression idea - running twice
the same program should provide the same results -, to compare the
output between running the program under Windows and running it under
Wine.
Eric also liked to idea of writing test cases in C which would allow
to test three cases:
* test case compiled and run under Windows,
* test case compiled under Windows, and run with wine
* test case compiled under Unix as a Winelib application
Alexandre Julliard really backed up the idea of the Perl test scripts:
"The idea of using an interpreter like Perl is precisely that you
don't need to compile anything to run tests. I think this is important
because not everybody has a Windows compiler. It also allows using the
exact same test script under Windows and Wine, so that you don't have
to worry whether your Windows binary exactly matches your Winelib
binary. "
Eric and Alexandre further argued whether it was more common not to
find a compiler or not to find a Perl interpreter on a PC/Windows box.
François Gouget also liked the C/C++ tests because " The downside of
interpreter-based tests are:
* they won't test the Winelib headers or Winelib specific issues
* I imagine that some of our potential test writers would be windows
programmers (after all these tests would be nothing more than
simple Windows applications). They would probably be more
comfortable writing tests in C/C++.
"
The thread ended with Eric and Alexandre still arguing on some other
points. All the details of the test harness are not settled down yet,
but the effort of providing such an environment has started. We'll
keep you posted with the advances.
Wine .so files' names Issue
Andreas Mohr asked whether all the Wine libraries shouldn't be renamed
to libwineXXX to avoid any conflict with existing libraries. Wine
already had a clash with libole.so and gnumeric.
After some discussion on how the current distributions were doing
their packages (Debian, RedHat...), Ove Kaaven explained what should
be the final scheme.
The Wine DLL files (to be semantically correct, read the .so files
containing Wine's DLLs ; see [4]for the details) should be stored in
/usr/lib/wine (as FSH suggests). All the other .so files (like
libwine_unicode, libwine_tsx11...) should be stored into /usr/lib (or
any directory pointed by /etc/ld.conf). /usr/lib/wine shouldn't be
referenced by the /etc/ld.conf configuration file.
Any program (winelib or wine itself) which wants to import a file will
do it through the import directive of its .spec file (and will not
require the support of the linker (like using -lfoo) for that).
In other words, all is already in place for a proper storage, avoiding
any naming conflicts.
Credits: [5]Doug Ridgway, [6]Eric Pouech, and [7]Ove Kåven.
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References
1. ftp://wine.codeweavers.com/pub/other/perlwine.tar.gz
2. http://www.activestate.com/
3. http://www.winehq.com/News/2000-43.html#0
4. http://www.winehq.com/News/2000-51.html#FTR
5. mailto:ridgway@winehq.com
6. mailto:pouech@winehq.com
7. mailto:ovek@winehq.com