On February 22, 2004 09:52 am, jiangyi178 wrote:
What is WINE project's role in future Linux programming? Will WINE/WineLib be so powerful that it will be the mainstream of Linux programming? Or it will remain part of Linux programming culture, but not the main stream?
This is a question of policy rather than technology, and as such everybody has their opinion on it. My personal take on the situation is that I would like to make Win32 a first-class citizen in the Linux Universe. That is, if you want to create a Linux program, you should be free to write it either for GTK or Win32, knowing full well that your end product will integrate perfectly in the Linux landscape.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that the Win32 API is a better API than the GNOME/GTK one. A lot of people claim the other way is true, and they are probably correct. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it should be _your_ _choice_ to make, not ours to shove down your throat.
I believe that backwords compatibility is paramount, and we have most of the planet that knows Win32 inside out. In Romanian we have a saying: "The shortest way is the known way". In other words, for most people the most effective and efficient way to get a job done is to use what they know. It's a reasonable thing to do. That is why our attempts to push Perl as the scripting language for our conformance tests failed: it is much easier for me to write a little more verbose test in C, rather then learn Perl to do.
Learning how to use another huge environment like GNOME is a huge undertaking that costs years in training, and unmentionable amounts of money that make little sense from a business perspective. As a community (Linux), we should _offer_ an alternative if we think we can do much better (and this is a discussion on its own that I'm not going into right now). But the keywork here is alternative. Our users may have perfectly valid reasons to stick to what they know, at least for now.
So if we succeed, we'll offer people this alternative. Whether folks will stick to the Win32 API for the long hall, or will migrate as soon as possible to the GNONE/KDE/<your pick> API is anybody's guess.