2009/1/22 Paul TBBle Hampson Paul.Hampson@pobox.com:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 06:34:14PM +0100, Francois Gouget wrote:
On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Paul TBBle Hampson wrote: [...]
What about apps that fail to include a necessary third-party library?
If I understand the AppDB comments and followed the IRC discussion correctly, Warcraft 3's latest patch (1.22) was built with a newer Visual Studio and so requires new Visual C runtimes, while previous versions did not. And the patcher doesn't install these runtimes.
If you don't need to manually install the third-party library on a stock installation of the application's officially supported Windows platform (e.g. Wow on Windows XP), then you should not need to manually install it in Wine. If you do, then that application cannot be rated platinum.
True, but not the point I'm talking about.
On a stock install of Windows XP, you'd have to go get the runtimes and install them, same as under a stock Wine prefix.
On a well-used Windows XP install, you most likely already have the Visual Studio 7 runtimes installed, so won't notice the flaw in the installer. Same as under a well-used Wine prefix.
To my mind, this shouldn't prevent the application being rated platinum.
The maintainer of Warcraft 3 rather feels that until Wine implements the Visual Studio 7 runtime libraries as builtins, Warcraft 3 cannot be rated platinum.
Perhaps this argument can be summarised thusly: If 1. the required libraries are not intended to be a part of Wine (e.g., obscure 3rd-party runtimes) at any time in the future, and 2. the application requiring the libraries does not correctly ship the runtime libraries, then C. the requirement of native versions of the libraries separate from an application's installer should not impede an application from being rated "Platinum".
So in the case of Warcraft 3 (or WoW, or whatever we're talking about now), we've established that #2 is true for the patch (the patch does not ship with the VC7 runtime, required to run the game after patching). Perhaps the question remains, is a VC7 runtime library intended to be developed and shipped with Wine? I don't think this is the case.
What it boils down to is expected behaviour. Is it expected that the patched game should fail, due to missing VC7 runtime, on a regular Windows system (assuming no other software has installed VC7 runtime already)? If so, then it is in fact working correctly, and perhaps does deserve a "Platinum" rating.