Wine 4.20 | Hacker News Reader

Wine 4.20

winehq.org

137 pointskick31 comments

What has always amazed me about the Wine project his how they have continued, unphazed, to fight was they knew from the beginning to be a losing battle (tracking an ever changing, ever growing API with no proper documentation of what the API actually does, especially wrt side-effects) all the way to something that is actually usable.

I would even venture to wager that in 20 years, the only way to run certain old Windoze binaries will on top of Wine because the proprietary mountain of crap that is the Windows commercial API offering will have fully fossilized and been dissolved by the winds of time.

Kudos, I am truly in awe of this project.

Already the case with some old Windows games.

It's quite an achievement of the project to be able to run such a large amount of Windows software, but if you're trying to run a particular program, it's still pretty hit or miss (then again it's increasingly hit or miss with recent Windows versions and old software, too).

It's not always Windows' or Wine's fault though, often it's blatant misuse of the API that just happened to work on some old Windows version.

My employer runs our payroll software on WINE because they already can't get it to work on modern Windows.

Very cool and in a way sensible - old Windows isn't a moving target anymore, so WINE is in a perfect position to be the solution there.

I love Wine. It's amazing.

I wish there had been a joke about running CBD flavored apps or something with this release.

What is the Mono engine? What does FNA stand for?

FNA is an open-source clone of the Microsoft XNA game programming libraries for .NET/CLR/whatever the right scope/trademark for that platform is. I don't think it actually stands for anything. Wikipedia says that XNA stands for "XNA's not acronymed", but I think the source was joking.

Mono: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)

No idea about FNA though.

Typical HN. A post about Wine with 11 comments, of which 100% are meta comments about the version number and 0% about Wine itself.

Wine is great, since it can run Age of Empires 2 in network mode without any issues (less issues than on Windows 7, actually), I can fully ditch Windows on my laptop! :)

AoE II HD or regular? Is it possible to do LAN gaming with the HD version? I thought it's only for Steam users. Also, I'm interested in figuring out how to install Chinese language packs for AoE II HD without weird font issues.

Yes, I just confirmed that Hacker News comments are often off-topic. But at least we agree that Wine is great for AoE.

It isn't off-topic, as the version number is incorrect. Why one of the mods changed it to an incorrect version number is beyond me.

Age of Forgotten Empires (the community mod) works great. I don't know about other versions.

To be fair, this seems a pretty incremental release. There's nothing groundbreaking that 4.20 can do that 4.19 can do and this post doesn't list any specific apps that have had major improvements in functionality.

People could discuss wine in general, but that would require new talking points to interest most people.

Why was this title changed? It’s just downright inaccurate now? The linked release is 4.20

Indeed. Even with some versioning schemes where 4.2 would equal 4.20 I wouldn't see the point in changing the title from what the project itself used. And if I'm reading this[1] correctly, the versions look pretty straightforward (i.e. 4.1 < 4.10 etc.).

[1] https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/commits/master/VERSION

Looks like semver to me but with x.y instead of x.y.z

I agree. 4.2 was released in February: https://www.winehq.org/news/2019021501

Note that Wine is one of those confusingly-versioned projects where 4.20 is the one that comes after 4.19

I would say that's like pretty much every project out there. I can't come up with an example which matches the other case off the top of my head. Does that make other ones the confusing ones?

It's less confusing when there is more than 1 decimal point. 4.11.4 is clearly not a regular decimal number.

I don't know of any other software where x.10 does not come after x.9, or x.20 does not come after x.19 etc.

Some software increases the x before that though.

Winamp used a decimal numbering scheme. Version 5.6 is followed by 5.601, then 5.62. There's also the obligatory v1.6 < v1.666 < v1.7 version numbering of Doom.

I think Windows 3.1 to 3.11 was another example of decimal version numbering, instead of calling it v3.1.1.

Blenders version is a bit confusing sometimes. Officially its release 2.80 but that is very often called 2.8 even from official channels [1]. I was a bit confused when then announced 2.8 which is the version after 2.79.

[1] https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/

They always count from 00 onwards with a leading 0, though (x.01, ... x.09, x.10 etc.).

The equivalent in the more common versioning scheme would be 2.8.0 which would then also be called 2.8.

Well their scheme does leave some questions open: Does 3.00 need to come after 2.99 or can there be a 2.100? Or if its more like 2.8.x: Can ever be a x.x.10? (we are talking here more about the scheme that actual blender releases)

How I currently understand is its just 2 numbers and 2.8 is a simplification for meaning 2.8x.

What would non-confusingly come after 4.19, just out of interest?

He's probably thinking about decimal numbers, so 4.2 is expected instead of 4.20

Perhaps 4.19a

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning#Incrementi...

It's 4.20, not 4.2 really. Just built it with esync patches. Once fsync gets into upstream kernel, there won't the need for esync hack.

when will arch repo going to be blazing it

AFAIC, the only burning Wine update right now will be a fix for 32 bit apps in macOS Catalina, which this update does not contain.

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