Wine is far enough along that it ought to be able to build and run unit test suites from apps like Inkscape, Firefox, and OpenOffice, so I'm trying to write scripts that download and build various apps unattended, and eventually run their own test suites. The scripts are written to run equally well on Windows and Wine. This is hard to do without something like Cygwin or Autohotkey; I'm using Cygwin for my scripts out of personal preference.
I already did a build script for Inkscape using mingw; http://kegel.com/wine/inkscape-download-and-build.sh.txt
Now I'm tackling Firefox. So far the script installs Visual C++ 2005 Express and the 2003 platform SDK; see http://kegel.com/wine/vc2005x.sh.txt Next step: grabbing firefox source and building.
I'm also filing bugs as I go; 19673 Microsoft Platform Installer 2003 fails to install 19668 cmd /c doesn't wait for result before exiting? 19636 Vista SDK installer fails in "Microsoft VC Redist 2008" subinstaller 19615 Can't compile Inkscape with mingw on wine: fd leak? 19581 Visual Studio 2005: "cl : Command line error D8022 : cannot open 'foo.rsp' "; foo.rsp was created with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY 19502 Visual Studio 2005 SP1 install seems to fail
While one doesn't really need to build the apps under Wine to run their test suites, it's a pain to have to compile them on one system and ship them over to another. And supporting building might have a nice benefit: if it's easy to develop for Windows on Wine, more Windows developers might bother to test their apps on Wine. So I think it's worth the extra effort. - Dan