Re: [HACKERS] Most Advanced

On Wed, Feb 16, 2000 at 12:04:54AM +0200, Hannu Krosing wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > 
> > > Actually, I think you might be looking at this wrong ... figure that Corel
> > > is putting resources into making WINE a viable "engine" to running
> > > Micro$loth applications ... WINE is open source.
> > >
> > > Now, which is better/easier?  Re-code Wordperfect Office (one app) to run
> > > natively, or improve an open source application so that Linux/Unix can run
> > > any existing Micro$loth product?  Which is cheaper in the long run?
> > >
> > > If they were starting WordPerfect from scratch, okay ... but how many
> > > hundreds of thousands of lines of Windoze specific code is in
> > > WP-Office? :)
> > 
> > I have never been very confident about emulation of any form.  Also, if
> > Corel has Inprise and Corel Linux, you would think it would be worth
> > making the port to a _real_ operating system.
> 
> AFAIIC they are just using WINE as their cross-platform toolkit, same as
> Mozilla 
> does with theirs XPCOM (or whatever it's called;).
> I don't see any of the GUI toolkits as basically better than others (though I 
> have used lately wxPython).
> And cross-platform is important nowadays - even in my small company there are 
> developers using Linux,BeOS,Win32 and Macs and it is counterproductive if we 
> have to use some important tool that isnt available for some platform or can't 
> be run remotely (over http/html or X11)

I've been following WINE development longer than PostgreSQL, so I
think I should comment on this. Hannu's exactly right: WINE Is Not
an Emulator, it's an implementation of the Win32 API on top of Unix/X
(well, mostly Linux, but they do occasionally get someone testing on
*BSD). Given that, there _is_ a second component: implementation of
the Win32 ABI. This is the wine executable that sometimes gets called
the "emulator". The API implementation requires recompiling your Win32
targeted code - this is a 'winlib' app. The wine executable knows all
about loading Windows format binaries, so you can run Windows _binaries_
directly. Such a clean distinction didn't really exist, at first. Since
_most_ Windows programs that people wanted to run where binary only,
and the idea that companies might actually recompile their code for the
Linux market (what market?) was somewhat laughed at, the WINE project
started as an ABI emulation, and only fairly recently has restructured,
to include both. The eventual goal is the the wine executable will just
be another winlib app, just like any other, it just knows how to read
a Windows binary, and do any fix-up needed.

As to Corel's work with WINE: their developers (and their contractors)
have had their own, until quite recently private, tree, but they have
been pushing patches out to the public tree on a regular basis, and
participating in design discussions on the public mailing lists. The
recent opening of their tree seems to me to have come about to alleviate
the problem of needing to push patches out, as release deadline pressures
neared. In fact, that was explicitly mentioned by one of their developers,
who invited everyone to generate patch sets and submit them to the open
tree. The use of WINE as opposed to 'native' I read as "Win32 binary"
rather than winlib, ELF binary.

Ross

-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005