On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Scott Ritchie scott@open-vote.org wrote:
On 05/25/2010 11:39 AM, Dan Kegel wrote:
On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Avery Pennarun apenwarr@gmail.com wrote:
In either case, you probably want to bundle the Wine runtime with the app rather than trying to run against whatever Wine the user has.
I guess this is because wine is such a moving target? It seems a shame to bundle a copy of wine with every single app, although I can definitely see how commercial products would want to do that to improve repeatability. One would hope that all the automated testing wine is doing lately would reduce the need for this kind of thing eventually.
Commercial apps should continue bundling their own wine no matter what we do, I think. It'll be a while before they can count on everyone already having a wine installed that can handle their app. And security concerns might prevent wine from being installed by default on some distros.
I believe a reasonable alternative is to communicate directly with the distro Wine packager and have them test your app against whatever version of Wine they plan on shipping. That way you don't miss out on good changes in Wine either.
In essence, you come to me with your app, have me verify the packaging and put it in the archive (or store if it's a paid app), and have it depend on the system Wine. Then I check it against every Wine version that gets into an official Ubuntu release.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie
They'd have to contact 300+ Linux distributions every +/- 6 months to ensure their application works on every version of every distribution - and that's only if every user uses the single Wine version that the distribution version originally shipped with.
Maybe each distribution should instead adhere to LSB standards and pre-install the Autopackage/Zeroinstall runtimes which would allow third parties to package their own stuff and have it work out of the box on every distribution? Zeroinstall for example lets you parallel install several versions of the same package - so you could have a Wine version for a specific Winelib application and another Wine version for every other application.
Thank you Damjan Jovanovic