http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31237
Bug #: 31237 Summary: libfaketime: integrate with libfaketime to allow running a program with a fake time Product: Wine Version: unspecified Platform: x86 OS/Version: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: enhancement Priority: P2 Component: -unknown AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org ReportedBy: alister.hood@gmail.com Classification: Unclassified
Like Wine, faketime is another lib/application that is useful for running legacy programs, for example those which can no longer run because of the "millenium bug". It lets you present a fake system time to a program.
It would be nice if the functionality of libfaketime could be integrated with Wine.
The faketime executable and Wine do not cooperate well. Some programs such as winecfg and notepad work well, but when you try to run other programs (e.g. Excel 2007 which was one I tried) they crash, and then any subsequent programs you try to run also crash, even programs which worked fine before running Excel or whatever the problem program was:
# faketime '2006-09-20' winecfg wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address (nil) (thread 001d), starting debugger...
Some Wine programs do actually run fine apart from outputting this error, but others crash properly.
I reported this to the faketime developer, and this was his reply:
Basically, libfaketime has clear limitations when it comes to programs that spawn child processes due to the LD_PRELOAD design. Wine probably starts a lot of sub-programs, and since only the parent process is tricked into seeing the faked time, but the spawned child processes get access to the real wall clock time, this inconsistency might lead to this page fault crash.
As of today, we have undertaken several steps to make libfaketime capable of supporting spawned child processes (at least on Linux), but we're not quite there yet. Some problems we ran into so far are still K.O. criteria, so I can't promise any delivery date right now.
However, libfaketime can be integrated into other programs quite easily, so if the Wine developers would use it in their Wine source, faking the time for any Wine-executed program would be quite trivial and without all those sub-process hassles. However, I don't know whether the Wine guys would be interested in such an option
So, are "the Wine guys" interesting in integrating libfaketime with Wine?
FYI here's a link: http://www.code-wizards.com/projects/libfaketime/index.html