On 28/09/2007, David Outteridge dajo@frii.com wrote:
Thank you for the reply, Dan, a reply is appreciated.
I must write that I am surprised by this response - your website seems to be asking for help at all levels.
Help *is* needed at all levels.
Wine needs testers to test their favorite applications and report bugs. Without the bug reports, the developers don't know (or will miss) regressions or features that are not supported in Wine yet.
It is also a good idea to add an entry to the AppDB (and possibly to the equivalent one over at www.codeweavers.com for the CrossOver version of Wine). This helps the developers know where to focus their attention to get the best coverage. Note that this does not mean that because your application is not popular it will not be fixed.
This is where people like you can come in and help improve the support for running Windows applications on Wine.
I am not quite convinced that months of work is needed (mainly because corelDRAW version 11 works); but maybe you know something I do not - the main point of my posting, of course.
In general, applications that run on Windows 98 or earlier should (in theory) run without problems. The more recent the version of Windows an application wants to use, the less likely it will run, or run well. Newer versions of an application will tend to take advantage of newer features in Windows and start requiring more recent versions, increasing the chances that it will run into areas that are not implemented, or partially implemented in Wine.
For example, the latest version of Wine has added support for side-by-side manifests for installing different versions of a DLL with the same name. This was introduced in Windows XP and is required by newer applications. Also, GDIPlus - an extended drawing interface - was also introduced in XP and has only recently been partially supported in Wine.
The effort to support iTunes 7 took several months to complete, even though earlier iTunes were working. So getting CorelDraw 13 to work is likely not to be an easy task. Once the program installs, there are likely to be regressions with CorelDraw itself.
Largely, I was asking for policy information; i.e., *what* to do, not *how* to do it, which I feel I can handle.
I would suggest raising bug reports for each issue that you encounter as this will help developers track the problems that CorelDraw 13 has on Wine.
Also, try and help maintain the application on the Wine AppDB and CodeWeavers application support page.
And keep testing!
HTH, - Reece