On Saturday 23 February 2008, Dan Kegel wrote: > On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > For example, there is no sane reason in the world that VC++ should > > always work under Wine, considering the deep knowledge of Windows > > that is built into VC++. > > I don't think that's a good example. While I agree that > Wine is not designed to run ALL windows software > (it'll never run arbitrary VxD's, for instance), it can and > will run Visual C++. Visual C++ 6 works quite well modulo > one bug in ole32, and Visual C++ Toolkit 2003 installs and > runs pretty well module two bugs keeping .net 1.1 from installing. > Visual C++ 6 and 2003 will eventually work well enough to make > Windows developers comfortable. And valgrind will support windows > apps well enough that Windows developers might... actually... > prefer... to develop their Windows apps on Linux sometimes. Maybe it is a bad example, it's the first one I pulled out of my head. But really, why would one compile something for Windows on Wine? I can see that some OSS Windows apps might need a bit of tweaking and recompiling to run better on a specific setup, but to do that legitimately you'd need a valid license for the dev tools. Such a person would also have a Windows machine to hand surely? It's also a handy way for a Wine dev to check that bits of Wine are working correctly, but is it really that useful in the general case, is it something that regular users would do and does it warrant an especially high priority? There's also the legal issue. Yes I know this isn't a nice topic but it has to be confronted at some point. Do the MS dev tools permit installation and running on a non-MS platform? That might have been something not explicitly stated in older licenses, but I'll bet it's certainly not the case with the dev stuff MS released just this week for example. I must admit thought that it would be cool to support things like compilers and get a better more efficient result than MS can <evil grin>. That kind of technical expertise impresses me greatly but we do have to stay within reasonable limits -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
