Peter Beutner wrote:
IMHO all this stuff goes a bit too much into the wrong direction.
I really fear that this will end up with vendors loudly advertising
linux support and proudly putting linux stickers on their products
where everything you find inside are just the same windows .exe files
and a readme stating that these will work fine with wine.
Which at least is not what I would like to see.
Why? Wine is effectively just a different toolkit, like QT or GTK
(albeit much larger) that give applications a Windows, KDE and Gnome
look respectively. Take Notepad for example - with some slight
modifications you could even modify the File Open dialog to only show
the Unix namespace. Is there any reason that this application can't be a
fully fledged part of the desktop?
The main thing the _developers_ should be pointed to(if they care
about their product on other platforms then windows) are some decent
docs about platform-independent programming :p
Sure. While you're at it give them some docs about globalization
practices and efficient CPU usage. These are all nice to have things,
but you have to face it that if you're a developer at a software company
with a deadline then these are the first things to be ignored. You also
have to bear in mind that it is incredibly difficult to do platform
idependent GUI programming, whilst still maintaining the Windows look.
Maybe it's just me but when reading all this I got the feeling that
writing windows applications(which work with wine) is just *the* way
to go.
It is the cheapest way for companies and it gives good results for the
users. What's wrong with that?
Not that I generally disagree with what you wrote. Actually it's
mostly totally fine.And it's definitly a good thing when vendors care
about their product running with wine or companies migrating to linux
trying to get their highly-specialized-app to work with wine.
But imho it _shouldn't_ be the long term solution.
Wine is a very good way of testing the waters with a Linux market. If a
significant part of the market share starts coming from Linux or other
Unix operating systems then the company can start offering winelib
extensions that integrate better with the environment in which they are
running.
However, you have to face facts that Linux is a hostile environment for
commercial companies - constantly changing APIs, lack of regression
testing by distributions, lots of variations meaning lots of testing
needed and different standards on different distributions. Wine is a
layer on top of that, which provides a degree of stability.
--
Rob Shearman
