On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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? Because he doesn't want to use Windows yet he has to use Visual Studio? > 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? > Not surely at all. Anyone can acquire Visual Studio without having or getting Windows. > 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 > If you're referring to Visual Studio again, as Dan already stated, it works pretty well and there aren't many issues left to fix. They're certainly within reasonable limits. -- James Hawkins
