On 2/22/07, Juan Lang juan_lang@yahoo.com wrote:
I'm just trying to build up a picture in my head of whether there will come a day when Wine users can pick an app designed for a previous generation of Windows and expect it to work flawlessly (ignoring things that try to manipulate the hardware directly, I suppose)? Or will there always be incompatibilities?
There will (likely) always be incompatibilities. Wine development has always been driven by app compatibility - someone picks an app and tries to run it, and tries to fix problems they come across. We don't aim for feature completeness - Windows is far, far too big to replicate with the resources we have. So, some apps (the ones developers have worked on, and likely others) will work quite well, while others (those that haven't been worked on) may not work as well.
Many older apps do work well on wine. In fact, older apps usually work better than the newer ones.
We don't need to replicate all of Windows for apps to work properly - just enough. Only a relatively small amount of functionality is required - look at NTDLL, only a tiny fraction of its 1000 or so functions are implemented at the moment, as few are needed.
Look at what Microsoft did for Windows Vista: a year or so ago, the application compatibility was only 40% or so (there was a joke that wine runs more apps than Vista :-), and in that year, it's been improved so much that most apps work. The same can be done, and is being done, for wine.
--Juan
Damjan