Severn and Wine and Emulators

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, HoytDuff wrote:

>Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 06:45:41 -0400
>From: HoytDuff <hoyt at cavtel.net>
>To: rhl-beta-list at redhat.com
>Content-Type: text/plain;
>  charset="us-ascii"
>List-Id: For testers of Red Hat Linux beta releases
>    <rhl-beta-list.redhat.com>
>Subject: Severn and Wine and Emulators
>
>Is the current Wine working with Severn? it got removed in RH9; any chance of 
>it coming back?

The various reasons that wine was removed from RHL are highly 
unlikely to ever change, so it's equally highly unlikely that 
wine will ever be an official package that is part of RHL by 
default again.  That doesn't prevent someone else from 
maintaining a package in Fedora or Freshrpms or somewhere though, 
and I would highly suggest either of those two places for wine 
rpms even if wine _was_ part of the distribution.

Basically, wine changes quite quickly, and the distribution just 
simply can't track it's development that closely and keep it 
updated to current.  If we were to ship wine, by the time the 
distribution is shipped to people and they're using it, the wine 
in the distribution is ancient.  We also don't have the manpower 
to maintain it, so bug reports against wine are pretty useless 
IMHO, unless someone is using the latest snapshot of it - which 
we wouldn't be shipping.

A project like fedora or freshrpms however can update their wine
package every week or two to the latest version, and someone who
is actually interested in maintaining and using wine running as
smooth as possible is more likely to keep the package updated and 
running smooth as possible with higher priority.  In the 
distribution, it would be a 3rd rate package probably 
unmaintained or maintained with as little effort as possible at 
best.

So basically, by not including wine, we're doing a service to the 
community, by allowing them to get a much newer updated wine that 
is actively maintained by someone or someones in the community, 
and easily installable via apt/yum or the new up2date which has 
yum support built in.


>How about the emulators: plex86, bochs, Win4Lin, the Mac
>emulators. Anyone have them working? I have a report that VMware
>works.

plex86 project died long ago and is unmaintained currently as far 
as I recall.  Bochs suffers a similar fate at one point I 
believe, but I'm not sure what it's current status is.  Win4Lin 
is proprietary software unless something has changed, so it's not 
an option.

All of these types of emulators/simulators/VMs, etc. are best 
maintained outside of the OS distribution itself, where the 
community can actively volunteer a lot more time to the 
maintenance of such packages than any attention an engineer would 
be spending on such a package which would be considered low 
priority.

Hope this helps understand why such packages aren't in the 
distribution.

Take care,
TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat