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Wine Staging

wine-staging.com

78 pointsivank47 comments

Wine is hell of a project. Having all those windows programs running on linux/os x is really a huge achievement. I know that there is still a way to go, but I really admire this herculean effort put into this project.

I'm always really impressed when things just work in Wine. I started using YNAB this year and sure enough, it worked in Wine _with Dropbox integration_. Pretty cool.

Interesting project, it's almost like they searched through the WineHQ bug tracker for unmerged fixes and made a huge branch with all of them. There are certainly a lot of fixes that never make it to mainline Wine. The handful I've been watching have gone nearly 5 years without any meaningful progress past the initial patch. Occasionally someone will comment that the issue still affects them. I'm not sure what the solution is, it's an unpaid project.

> "There are certainly a lot of fixes that never make it to mainline Wine."

Out of interest, why is that?

Lack of manpower. Improving, merging and testing a fix isn't zero-effort.

Alexandre Juliarde keeps a very high quality threshold for patches, which makes sense as it's such a complicated project.

This can make the conversations quite interesting from the outside if you're into this sort of thing.

Tracking fixes as .patch files in a git repository is.... an interesting way to go about things.

Not the first or only project to do this. Spigot, a fork of the CraftBukkit minecraft server, uses a similar approach [0]. It allows to easily collaborate with the upstream project (Just apply the feature's patch on current master).

[0] : https://hub.spigotmc.org/stash/projects/SPIGOT/repos/spigot/...

Wouldn't it be better to just keep the changes in a branch in a fork off of the upstream master branch? I would think that git would do a better job at re-applying to newer releases (i.e. merging from upstream master) than what patch(1) can do?

This makes me think that automatic rebasing and test running as a service would be an interesting product. Continuous integration of upstream changes into your possibly proprietary downstream fork (for features or ports), with Travis running each time.... You could avoid the problem of divergent forks!

I think you could probably make Travis do this itself - the script would be a bit gnarly though.

This is possibly the hardest version control problem I ever ran into. Especially in projects which have a large number of changes upstream (100+ commits daily), I've only seen bad and worse solutions.

The bad one is trying to follow upstream on each commit, notifying you every time some patch either doesn't work or doesn't merge anymore so you have to fix it manually. This still doesn't stop the cases where the patch in itself works, but doesn't make sense in the project anymore (some code moved around, tests still pass, but the functionality is not reachable). You also need a fair bit of architecture to test each of your patches with on each upstream change.

The worse solution is taking a few days off every time a bigger release is out and porting all patches. It saves on the continuous testing infrastructure, but takes unknown amount of time and you may discover some functionality simply cannot be migrated anymore. You're also likely to introduce many more bugs with rushed development.

I've been through planning something like this on a number of projects before. It's a lot of effort and it should be avoided as much as possible.

I think the product you describe could be actually a really good idea, but a lot of it would have to deal with as clever annotations as possible - what broke, when did it work the last time, who's responsible for porting, what functionality does it provide, is it critical/optional, etc.

That would require someone to read a man page or two. Which they clearly don't need to do because, nearly self-evident proof: they memorized the gnu diff and patch ones twenty years ago, QED.

Spigot does this for another reason: thanks to someone making the arguably stupid choice of using GPLv3 for a project linking to (propiertary) Minecraft source code, CraftBukkit has been DMCA'd by one of the lead developers over Mojang taking over the project when the lead dev team quit and is now essentially illegal to redistribute.

Was it ever legal to redistribute the proprietary Minecraft source code?

Interestingly enough, the mercurial 'mq' extension has full support for it: https://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MqExtension#Publishing_pa...

It's also a pretty common thing in package manager managers.

Is that a typo, or are there truly such things that manage package managers?

Perhaps, if we count people that product-manage among those things.

Android uses the repo tool to manage the many git repos where the actual code resides.

https://source.android.com/source/using-repo.html

Not sure if that's what gp meant.

It was not a typo. I was referring to the systems used by various linux distributions to manage how they build packages.

e.g. (sorry, I picked an example of openntpd, which only has 1 or 2 patches; other packages have many more!)

  - debian: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/openntpd.git/tree/debian/patches
  - arch: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/openntpd

I wonder what it would take to create/put-together a minimal window manager and stripped down version of Linux wired to run Windows software as its default mode or purpose. Would it rival ReactOS or is Wine simply too unstable to truly serve as a "whole" OS?

This is something I have thought about before. Perhaps more useful would be a desktop shell/WM that automatically manages bottling, plugs into PlayOnLinux when it makes sense etc. Building a usability and automated layer over Wine could compete with RiskOS I think.

Google "Lindows". A company tried to do exactly this circa 2001.

It came with the added fun of having Microsoft sue them, just to have the court say that "Windows" in the OS context is not a defensible trademark!

At which point MS settled out of court and kept Lindows in business for many years to come.

I happened to work there. Their app store was a much bigger focus internally than the ability to run Windows apps. I think one of their bigger mistakes was charging for Free Software apps in their Click-n-Run app store.

The company's probably long enough gone that I can mention there was an easter egg in earlier versions of the app store client, with developer credits. You had to queue apps to install such that their first letters spelled Click-n-Run, then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C. The easiest way to do it was using KDE2's dcop -- DBUS has nothing on DCOP's ease of use and discoverability.

The hallmark Windows apps dont run in WINE: Office, VS, Photoshop. The only advantage of the distro would be for games.

Help me submit bug reports for them then - first, which versions are you targetting?

Visual Studio 2015 - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI..., needs more investigation

Office 2013 - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... - at least this has a backtrace in the bug report

Photoshop - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI... - CS6 might work!

It's quite useful. I mostly use Wine staging instead of regular Wine. For instance support for PulseAudio is nice to have. Stock Wine still doesn't have it for some reason. And some other such things.

Pulseaudio support is definitely nice. I use stock wine and it's the main reason I use alsa. The alsa sink of pulse and wine don't run well together for some reason.

Curious, why does the link show as green on HN?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 (first link submitted from that domain)

For those who are wondering what exactly "a special wine version" is, it isn't some new version of the drink, it is "a free and open source compatibility layer software application that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems". "Wine" stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29#Pipelight....

Gentoo users: there's an USE flag for that ;) [https://github.com/wine-compholio/wine-staging/wiki/Installa...]

The url of the link seems incorrect : https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wine-staging.com

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 (click the name, not the domain name)

ok thank you for the answer and explanation :)

This is awesome! building wine in pkgsrc is broken for me at the moment (clang problems), so having a working/up to date wine build on OS X is great!

brew install wine --devel

brew install wine --HEAD

a good point. I used to use homebrew but I've dedicated my time pkgsrc proselytization, so I don't have homebrew installed anymore. I have a fontforge patch that I need to submit upstream, and I think I just need to install a newer gcc to get the builds to pass with pkgsrc. In the mean time I haven't tried an i686 build, which in theory should work..

What is the origin of "compholio"? I chuckled when I saw that for some reason.

It's a person's internet handle (http://www.compholio.com/) who wrote custom patches for Wine that were popular before they were incorporated into the mainline project... and not a thinly veiled Beavis and Butthead reference.

How does Wine, Mono, and Microsoft open source .Net play out?

http://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

"For Wine releases 1.5.3 and later, the Wine Mono package is recommended. For earlier versions, an official Windows release of Mono 2.10 is recommended.

Wine 1.5.6 will install Wine Mono automatically as needed."

"If you need to use Microsoft's implementation of the .NET framework, the Microsoft runtimes can partly run on Wine."

In the 90 ages, as linux user, I tried many times to use it, with not great result. But now with the virtualization I think that it lost its traction.

> Please note that our Wine Staging repository does not contain the full Wine source, which would be very intransparent for our users and developers. Instead we're providing Wine Staging as a patchset which has to be applied on top of the corresponding upstream Wine version.

Translation: we can't figure out how to use git, to actually make a transparent development stream that users can just pull: and check out to an arbitrary commit, etc. "Let's try this without the last three commits ... git checkout HEAD^^^ ... done".

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