On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Zachary Goldberg wrote: [...]
There were specific BSD builds of crossover posted sometime back after much demand and Codeweavers saw very very little response. As a result not much effort has been put into the area.
That sentence is clearly missing a '... by CodeWeavers'.
Because, this being a largely free world, CodeWeavers has no control on what the other Wine developpers do (or what CodeWeavers employees do on their free time, e.g. Alexandre helped fix some issues in the FreeBSD kernel).
[...]
I don't know why the BSD experience with CrossOver has to have any bearing on OS X and Solaris support for Wine.
[...]
As said above, it has no _direct_ bearing. But see below.
For Solaris, Wine just started working for me with 1.1.3 (there were 3 Solaris patches in that release).
I'm glad you're happy with CodeWeavers' work :-) CodeWeavers got a real demand to get Wine working on Solaris (as strange as that may seem) so we've been able to devote some resources to it. The patches you see in 1.1.3 (and some older and newer releases) are a result of this. That's how CrossOver demand for a platform has a bearing on Wine development: if we have clear demand for it we can devote resources, and since we push all our work straight back to Wine, Wine immediately benefits.
Maybe I'm wrong. But, if I'm wrong, then that doesn't mean that I don't want my platforms supported.
But that's the issue. These platforms will only be well supported if some of _their_ developers get interested in Wine and actually contribute to it. Currently I don't see that happening in any significant way. Every day people pop up on wine-devel or wine-patches submitting patches to make their Windows application work better in Wine... on Linux. But we rarely if ever see Solaris or FreeBSD developers pop up like that.
Why, I don't know. Maybe it's just the 'market share' and if so that would be sad. Maybe it's because up until recently Wine sucked on these platforms and improving it involved hard, highly technical, discouraging issues. But now these issues are gone (or so I'm told), so maybe we just need people to try again. If so, then there hope: it's just a matter of getting the word out. Here's a try:
Wine should work fine on FreeBSD 7.0 or greater. So if you're a FreeBSD developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!! (note, you really want >= 7.0 here)
Wine should work fine on Solaris 10u3 or greater. So if you're a Solaris developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!
(insert famous poster here and there)
And if it does not work, debug it, figure out why, ONLY YOU CAN DO THAT. Normally you should not hit big discouraging blockers anymore, just the usual missing functionality here and there.
So if getting the word out is the issue, then hopefully Zach's article will help. Beyond that I'm not sure what to do. WineHQ already has FreeBSD and Solaris packages (the Solaris ones are slightly out of date actually). Maybe putting an announcement on the WineHQ front page could help too? But we may need a wider reach...