Fwd: WWN 353

[Zachary Goldberg]

I'm forwarding (with permission) to Wine-Devel an email I got about
the most recent WWN and 'Other Platforms' support.

--Zach

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rodney Sparapani 
Date: Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:02 PM
Subject: WWN 353
To: [e-mail]

Hi Zachary:

I really like your column.  But, I was shocked to read:

The biggest issue in this area is demand. There were specific BSD builds
of crossover posted sometime back after much demand and Codeweavers saw
very very little response. As a result not much effort has been put into
the area. In short: if you're a user of Wine on BSD, Solaris or OS X and want
more support speak up!

I don't know why the BSD experience with CrossOver has to have any bearing
on OS X and Solaris support for Wine.  Let me say it clearly:  WE WANT SUPPORT!
I have been trying to get Wine to work on these platforms for years.
Some clever
hackers created the Darwine package for OS X which has Wine in a nice installer
and it has been working since about 0.9.12 (so a couple of years, I guess) and
improving (which may have more to do with Wine improvements).  For Solaris,
Wine just started working for me with 1.1.3 (there were 3 Solaris
patches in that
release).  Now, does this mean that I want to buy CrossOver?  Not necessarily.
I'm not sure if there is much to be gained.  I certainly would consider it,
if it was better.  However, from my experience with the beta on OS X, I don't
really see it as helpful at all.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But, if I'm wrong, then
that doesn't mean that I don't want my platforms supported.

--
Rodney Sparapani      Center for Patient Care & Outcomes Research (PCOR)
Sr. Biostatistician              http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better!  Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?:  What Would Lombardi Do?  Milwaukee, WI, USA

[Francois Gouget]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Zachary Goldberg wrote:
[...]
> > There were specific BSD builds of crossover posted sometime back 
> > after much demand and Codeweavers saw very very little response. As 
> > a result not much effort has been put into the area.

That sentence is clearly missing a '... by CodeWeavers'.

Because, this being a largely free world, CodeWeavers has no control on 
what the other Wine developpers do (or what CodeWeavers employees do on 
their free time, e.g. Alexandre helped fix some issues in the FreeBSD 
kernel).

[...]
> I don't know why the BSD experience with CrossOver has to have any bearing
> on OS X and Solaris support for Wine.

[...]

As said above, it has no _direct_ bearing. But see below.
> For Solaris, Wine just started working for me with 1.1.3 (there were 3 
> Solaris patches in that release).

I'm glad you're happy with CodeWeavers' work :-) CodeWeavers got a real 
demand to get Wine working on Solaris (as strange as that may seem) so 
we've been able to devote some resources to it. The patches you see in 
1.1.3 (and some older and newer releases) are a result of this. That's 
how CrossOver demand for a platform has a bearing on Wine development: 
if we have clear demand for it we can devote resources, and since we 
push all our work straight back to Wine, Wine immediately benefits.
> Maybe I'm wrong.  But, if I'm wrong, then that doesn't mean that I 
> don't want my platforms supported.

But that's the issue. These platforms will only be well supported if 
some of _their_ developers get interested in Wine and actually 
contribute to it. Currently I don't see that happening in any 
significant way. Every day people pop up on wine-devel or wine-patches 
submitting patches to make their Windows application work better in 
Wine... on Linux. But we rarely if ever see Solaris or FreeBSD 
developers pop up like that.

Why, I don't know. Maybe it's just the 'market share' and if so that 
would be sad. Maybe it's because up until recently Wine sucked on these 
platforms and improving it involved hard, highly technical, discouraging 
issues. But now these issues are gone (or so I'm told), so maybe we just 
need people to try again. If so, then there hope: it's just a matter of 
getting the word out. Here's a try:

Wine should work fine on FreeBSD 7.0 or greater.
   So if you're a FreeBSD developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!
   (note, you really want >= 7.0 here)

Wine should work fine on Solaris 10u3 or greater.
   So if you're a Solaris developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!

(insert famous poster here and there)

And if it does not work, debug it, figure out why, ONLY YOU CAN DO THAT. 
Normally you should not hit big discouraging blockers anymore, just the 
usual missing functionality here and there.

So if getting the word out is the issue, then hopefully Zach's article 
will help. Beyond that I'm not sure what to do. WineHQ already has 
FreeBSD and Solaris packages (the Solaris ones are slightly out of date 
actually). Maybe putting an announcement on the WineHQ front page could 
help too? But we may need a wider reach...

[Rodney Sparapani]

Francois Gouget wrote:
> I'm glad you're happy with CodeWeavers' work :-) CodeWeavers got a real 
> demand to get Wine working on Solaris (as strange as that may seem) so 
> we've been able to devote some resources to it. The patches you see in 
> 1.1.3 (and some older and newer releases) are a result of this. That's 
> how CrossOver demand for a platform has a bearing on Wine development: 
> if we have clear demand for it we can devote resources, and since we 
> push all our work straight back to Wine, Wine immediately benefits.

Hi Francois:

So, are you saying that if we want Wine supported on Solaris, then we
should buy CrossOver Solaris? If so, I guess I don't see a problem
with that, I'm just trying to clarify what you are saying. I didn't
even know there was such a product. How much is it?
> Wine should work fine on Solaris 10u3 or greater.
>    So if you're a Solaris developer, try it! Wine wants YOU!!!
>
> (insert famous poster here and there)
>
> And if it does not work, debug it, figure out why, ONLY YOU CAN DO THAT. 
> Normally you should not hit big discouraging blockers anymore, just the 
> usual missing functionality here and there.
>
> So if getting the word out is the issue, then hopefully Zach's article 
> will help. Beyond that I'm not sure what to do. WineHQ already has 
> FreeBSD and Solaris packages (the Solaris ones are slightly out of date 
> actually). Maybe putting an announcement on the WineHQ front page could 
> help too? But we may need a wider reach...

Well, I don't consider myself a developer. But, I agree. I have often
asked Sun for help, but they say ask Wine!?! It makes me mad since I am
actually paying them after all. I'll leave it at that :o) Furthermore, I
doubt that you will ever see a patch from me. I've looked over the
Wine sources and it is way over my head. Not to mention, there appears to
be a rather high bar to patches being accepted; a bar I doubt that I could
ever reach.

However, I would like to offer
some feedback. CrossOver beta on OS X was not what I was expecting after
using Darwine. I think CrossOver beta should be more like Darwine since
we don't want 2 entirely different ways of doing things. Unless, of
course, there is some additional functionality. But, that is not clear
to me. We've tried to get some answers about these questions with respect to
R2WinBUGS, but the responses were either not understood by me or they
did not actually address the question. Similar remarks would apply to
Solaris (CrossOver and Wine being more alike than not), but I haven't seen
the product yet so this might not be an issue.