On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle@t-systems.com wrote:
Hi,
Yesterday I edited http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs to be much less outdated than before and today I found that Dmitry Timoshkov removed all references to Mike Kronenberg's Wine binary distribution at http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/
This is unappropriate censorship to me. http://wiki.winehq.org/MacOSX/FAQs?action=diff&rev2=39&rev1=40
Am I upset? It costs me precious time to write code and documentation, so I dislike it when it gets deleted for uncomprehensible reasons. Censorship may be too strong a word.
The only gripes I understand about Kronenberg's work are:
- Although he agreed to change the name from Darwin to Wine in May, he has not yet done so. Cf. http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2009-May/075775.html
- Similarly, the license is still GPL, while Wine switched to LGPL long ago.
Other than that, his work seems solid and provides for a great user experience:
- It's built with Xcode 2.5, so it does not suffer from bug #14920
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14920 So 16bit applications work.
- It provides a WineHelper GUI applications that supposedly makes it
easy to start applications by clicking on icons. I never used it and am still researching the equivalent of xyz.desktop files from Linux. winemenubuilder does not work on MacOS so far.
- It contains a newer FreeType library than Apple's which I've read is buggy.
I can confirm that e.g. his winecfg "About" page looks as crisp as on Linux, whereas my build using only Apple resources shows ugly 'W' and kerning: in "Bibliothek", there should be one pixel horizontal space between letters, never 2. On Linux all lines are exactly one pixel wide, crisp as if hand-drawn. HKCU\FontSmoothing does not help, as the ugly 'W' just gets shades of grey. Perhaps the only difference is Tahoma.ttf (the 'f' looks different), i.e. font files rather than FreeType, but so far I did not further investigate this issue.
- He's been providing a binary distribution for a long time. Linux
experience shows that most people tend to download binaries rather than build themselves from source. Users of gentoo are sometimes considered exotic for that reason. OTOH on Mac, this seems normal, as neither Fink nor MacPorts provide online binary repositories. Strange.
- I looked into his build script.
http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/buildenv-1.1.5.zip It is basically ./configure & make as far as Wine is concerned. I can start /Volumes/Darwine/Contents.../bin/wine foo.exe like on Linux. Beside that, it builds WineHelper, FreeType and lots of other open source libraries. All but one of the 3-4 patches therein are obsolete (already in Wine git or perhaps only needed on Tiger). There's a single patch not in Wine: XGravity event handling. Hopefully Mike can comment on it. Presumably it should get into Wine as well.
So to me his binary appears like a pretty normal Wine build. This is not Cedega. I am about to submit a bug report to Wine bugzilla about MIDI audio based on his binary; I see no reason to dismiss it. Sadly I cannot produce the bug compiling myself, because of the above all-16bit-apps-crash bug with the Xcode3.x that I own.
The lingering problem is that those extra features make it different from 'vanilla' wine. While most of the patches in there are obsolete, they're still in the source and still applied. The build source isn't current, some of the package downloads are busted (not really a reason to 'block it' though).
In that discussion you've already referenced, most of this is already mentioned.
If there were a plain vanilla wine built on OS X, I think more developers would be receptive to it. Unfortunately, most developers don't have access to Mac's, and/or aren't focused on packaging/etc., but on more practical coding (fixing bugs, adding features, etc.).