On 10/20/05, Michael Stefaniuc mstefani@redhat.com wrote:
Dan Kegel wrote:
Is it common for Visual Basic applications to have problems installing under Wine?
I'm not sure about this. The question is: are there some common installers that are used in VB applications? Or is everybody point and clicking his own installer?
One common flavor of installer is the one that Microsoft shipped with VB studio; it's the kind of installer that one uses when the software to install is unpacked already on a LAN, so the installer just needs to copy files to the local machine. Other than that, I think the installers are probably the same as for C++ apps.
The installers of the most VB applications i have played with installed fine. One failed though due to bugs in VarCmp() and i think it was VarDiv(). I have quick fixes for those bugs in my tree but have no time at the moment to do the correct fixes with test cases and submit them.
Can you submit the rough patch as a work-in-progress?
Maybe there are hundreds of thousands of businesses and government offices that have large collections of VB apps written in-house ... they take one look at the trouble they have installing, and give up.
Are there any numbers to back this affirmation? My experience with the couple of small VB applications i tried is that the installer worked better than the program afterwards.
Here's what I know: the city governments of Munich, Mannheim, and one in Brazil say they have a subtantial number of VB applications, but they have not said that any of them install properly under Wine. I'm starting to focus now on this kind of application so I can understand the problem better. My first app is Church Windows; it's difficult to install because it assumes you have MFC40, MFC42, and the VB Runtime already installed, because it checks the IE6 version, *and* because it installs fonts that confuse Wine. Once you get past all that, it fails on startup with an "automation error" -- this is probably one of the low-hanging fruit you mentioned.
I have to agree that a good support for VB would be good for the adoption of Wine as VB seems to be the shell/awk/perl/whatever scripts of Windows users.
Indeed.
Does anyone have experience rolling VB (not VB.net) apps
Not me as i do not need Wine; i mean besides having fun hacking on it. And oleaut32 (used extensively by VB apps) has a lot of low hanging fruits aka missing features/bugs; to bad i do not have much time for Wine lately.