Wine Traffic #84 For 26 Feb 2001
Table Of Contents
Introduction
This is the 84th release of the Wine's kernel cousin
publication. It's main goal is to distribute widely what's
going on around Wine (the Un*x windows emulator).
Mailing List Stats For This Week
We looked at 67 posts in 246K.
There were 32 different contributors.
12 posted more than once.
14 posted last week too.
The top posters of the week were:
- 9 posts in 20K by Ove Kaaven <ovehk@ping.uio.no>
- 6 posts in 26K by Eric Pouech <Eric.Pouech@wanadoo.fr>
- 6 posts in 23K by Alexandre Julliard <julliard@winehq.com>
- 5 posts in 28K by Ian Pilcher <pilcher@concentric.net>
- 4 posts in 12K by FT Rathore <mawali@news.icns.com>
- Full Stats
1.
local IP and registry
19 Feb 2001 - 21 Feb 2001
(2 posts)
Archive Link: "TCP/IP networking and registry keys"
People:
Alan Chandler, Ove Kaaven,
Alan Chandler wrote: I spent most of the
weekend trying to get Grand Prix Legends GPL to work. I achieved my
first goal of getting it to run in server mode.
One of the things I needed to get the game to do, was to recognize
that there where some interfaces it could talk TCP/IP out of. It took
me some time to realize that under windows it was doing this by
looking for the key
[System\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\Class\\NetTrans]
and was then enumerating the keys under it to establish an IP address
ie the following:
[System\\CurrentControlSet\\Services\\Class\\NetTrans\\0000]
"IPAddress"="10.0.10.100"
The thought occurred to me that maybe the tool the builds the registry
during wine install could actually create these keys - since it is
essentially a key part of the system (and other similar keys are also
built in the same way).
the IP address can change between Wine invocations
(PPP, DHCP, and things like that), so it would have to be a dynamic
key, generated at Wine startup or something like that.
There is already some keys which are dynamically generated (like the
processor information - Pentium, stepping... - or copying the contents
of the init files into Wine specific registry keys to ease the reading
of those configuration afterwards), so the approach could be extended.
However, Ove wondered how the network interfaces could be gotten from
the OS in a portable way ? There hasn't been any answer so far.
2.
Setting up a Wine's test harness
14 Feb 2001 - 23 Feb 2001
(12 posts)
Archive Link: "Perl/Wine extension for perusal"
People:
John F Sturz, Alan Gonzalez, Jeremy White, Alexandre Julliard, Francois Gouget, CodeWeavers, , codeweavers, Joshua Thielen, Eric Pouech
John Sturtz (re)-opened the long awaited issue of bringing up a test
harness for Wine (and its implementation of the Windows API).
I work for CodeWeavers here in St Paul. Awhile back, I was set to the
task of working on winetest, a Wine application which provided a
flex/bison-based parser for a little scripting language from which
Wine API functions could be called. The idea was that one could write
test scripts which would call Wine API functions and examine the
results, and the scripts could be used for regression testing of Wine.
The scripting language began life with a rather Perl-ish syntax, and
as functionality got added, it got more so. Eventually (about the time
I had implemented a pack function, and wanted an unpack), I decided to
see if I could write a Perl extension that provided a gateway for
calling Wine API functions. That way, scripts for regression testing
could be written directly in Perl instead.
$atom = kernel32->GlobalAddAtomA("bark");
Joshua Thielen pointed out that some existing Perl modules for Win32
(from the ActiveState site)
allowed to provide the same interface as John's work (which was Linux
based only). Alan Gonzalez also noted that this
will work out of the box on cygwin for
windows using the perl 5.6.1 that is bundled with it.
Jeremy White then started to figure out what the test harness should
contain: I think it would be great if we could start
to define (and build) a test harness. I think that there are a lot of
people who would help write test scripts, who might otherwise be
unable to help with Wine development. The more the merrier, I always
say...
Jeremy started to split out the test cases into two categories:
- non-interactive: no user interaction is needed
- interactive: user interaction is needed
As already covered (see BROKEN KCREF), a free test tool for X11 regression test has not been
found yet, making the second category a bit difficult to run.
Eric Pouech proposed to have a two pass approach to run the
test. First the test case is run and outputs some results which are
stored into a file. Then, the contents of this file is compared
against a reference file.
This would allow, beyond the simple regression idea - running twice
the same program should provide the same results -, to compare the
output between running the program under Windows and running it under
Wine.
Eric also liked to idea of writing test cases in C which would allow
to test three cases:
- test case compiled and run under Windows,
- test case compiled under Windows, and run with wine
- test case compiled under Unix as a Winelib application
Alexandre Julliard really backed up the idea of the Perl test scripts:
The idea of using an interpreter like Perl is
precisely that you don't need to compile anything to run tests. I
think this is important because not everybody has a Windows
compiler. It also allows using the exact same test script under
Windows and Wine, so that you don't have to worry whether your Windows
binary exactly matches your Winelib binary.
Eric and Alexandre further argued whether it was more common not to
find a compiler or not to find a Perl interpreter on a PC/Windows box.
Francois Gouget also liked the C/C++ tests because
The downside of interpreter-based tests are:
- they won't test the Winelib headers or Winelib specific
issues
- I imagine that some of our potential test writers would be
windows programmers (after all these tests would be nothing more than
simple Windows applications). They would probably be more comfortable
writing tests in C/C++.
3.
Wine .so files' names
23 Feb 2001 - 24 Feb 2001
(12 posts)
Archive Link: "huge library renaming ?"
People:
Andreas Mohr, , Ove Kaaven
Andreas Mohr asked whether all the Wine libraries shouldn't be
renamed to libwineXXX to avoid any conflict with existing
libraries. Wine already had a clash with libole.so and gnumeric.
After some discussion on how the current distributions were doing
their packages (Debian, RedHat...), Ove Kaaven explained what should
be the final scheme.
The Wine DLL files (to be semantically correct, read the .so files
containing Wine's DLLs ; see BROKEN KCREF) should be stored in /usr/lib/wine (as FHS
suggests). All the other .so files (like libwine_unicode,
libwine_tsx11...) should be stored into /usr/lib (or any directory
pointed by /etc/ld.conf). /usr/lib/wine shouldn't be referenced by the
/etc/ld.conf configuration file.
Any program (winelib or wine itself) which wants to import a file will
do it through the import directive of its .spec file (and will not
require the support of the linker (like using -lfoo) for that).
In other words, all is already in place for a proper storage, avoiding
any naming conflicts.
Sharon And Joy