Wine and Mono

[Jonathan Ernst]

Hi,

.exe files are often associated with Wine so that it's easy for users to
double click a windows application and have it working like any native
application.

Wouldn't it be possible for Wine to detect .Net application and run them
using mono (mono app.exe) instead of just failing ?

If that's not wanted, would it be at least possible to issue a message
to tell the user that the application he'is trying to run is a .Net
application and that he should try running it using mono ?

What are your opinions about the handling of .Net executables ?

Thanks.

[David Lee Lambert]

Jonathan Ernst wrote:
> .exe files are often associated with Wine so that it's easy for users to
> double click a windows application and have it working like any native
> application.
>
> Wouldn't it be possible for Wine to detect .Net application and run them
> using mono (mono app.exe) instead of just failing ?

According to an MSDN article ( 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/03/PE2/default.aspx ),  .NET 
executables are just PE executables that happen to be linked against 
MSCOREE.DLL. Perhaps Wine could detect an attempt to load that DLL and 
call Mono instead.  In theory a program could execute arbitrary code 
first and then have too much state to pass to Mono safely,  but if a lot 
of these applications are mechanically generated stubs it might not be a 
problem.
> If that's not wanted, would it be at least possible to issue a message
> to tell the user that the application he'is trying to run is a .Net
> application and that he should try running it using mono ?
>
> What are your opinions about the handling of .Net executables ?

I tried running a .NET application the other day and it gave me a nice 
error-message (on the console) telling me that I needed to install .NET.

Now that Wine is finally, officially, in a numbered release,  it might 
be a good idea to reopen the question of Wine/Mono dynamic linking or 
other cooperation.  For an example of the bad feelings that some .NET 
users have about WIne,  take a look at the last post (the one dated 
10-15-2005, 6:55) on 
http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/1310/ShowPost.aspx  (note:  
SharpDevelop is an open-source .NET development environment.)

--
DLL

[Andreas Mohr]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:13:22AM -0400, David Lee Lambert wrote:
> Now that Wine is finally, officially, in a numbered release,  it might 
> be a good idea to reopen the question of Wine/Mono dynamic linking or 
> other cooperation.  For an example of the bad feelings that some .NET 
> users have about WIne,  take a look at the last post (the one dated 
> 10-15-2005, 6:55) on 
> http://community.sharpdevelop.net/forums/1310/ShowPost.aspx  (note:  
> SharpDevelop is an open-source .NET development environment.)

Oh, on the other hand rest assured that Wine people have even more bad feelings
about Mono ;)

He's talking about failing to stabilize Wine.
Well, he's wrong, since we're not even really stabilizing Wine; we need to
implement tons of things first, and *then* can we talk about fully stabilizing
Wine, which should then be relatively easy.
It's quite obvious that Wine cannot be stable as long as significant amounts
of APIs aren't even implemented yet...
(and a sizeable part of those is dead easy, so it's simply a matter of
having enough man power in many cases)

Andreas