Lots of news from TransGaming. Looks like these guys have been pretty busy lately. First off, they released Marble Blast Gold for Linux:

Development is rolling along on the WineX branch. May's voting report discusses the items they're focusing on. Battlefield 1942 is receiving some special attention. Nvidia vertex extensions are being replaced with standard OpenGL ARB. Also worth noting is support for hardware acceleration on ATI FireGL drivers. TransGaming noted the following results from April's voting:

Support for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City looks promising for the next release.

Also in the news this week was a comparison of CrossOver Office with Win4Lin in LinuxWorld. Nicholas Petreley's conclusion:

A thread started last week about holding an IRC meeting to discuss Wine development. Various people wrote in with their schedules and it appeared a few people (including Alexandre) were headed off on vacation. On Tuesday a decision was quickly proposed to hold it the next day. I was slightly surprised so many people were able to make it - about 45 developers showed up. An agenda was posted a few hours before the meeting:

Mike Hearn logged the meeting and made it available in real time on the web. He also kept a summary of it on his web page. Here's my own summary, in part based on Mike's notes. If you're interested in any of the issues listed above, I encourage you to look at the log. It's not too large and most the agenda was covered.

The to-do list for Wine 0.9 has remained mostly the same for several months now. The good news is things are gradually getting done. However, it was unknown whether that to-do list could actually be considered prerequisites for release. Alexandre felt a 0.9 needed to be architecturally complete - the tree cleaned up, a method for configuring Wine needed to be in place, etc. It also needs to get to the point where users can make useful bug reports.

Winecfg to configure Wine needs a lot of work and it's not clear how much work is being done. Someone named Mark (Mark Westcott, perhaps? mentioned he had done some work on it recently but hadn't submitted it. A few people encouraged him to submit whatever he had. Jaco Greef's original work was lost in a hard drive crash and no one wanted to see that repeated. Alexandre liked the idea of Winecfg and moving configuration into the registry, but he felt at some point the program should be made more modular. He didn't think that was necessarily something to worry about at this point though

The focus right now in the DLL separation area concerns NTDll and Kernel32. Eric Pouech and Alexandre are tackling it, but it's slow going. Eric mentioned one of the advantages that would come out of this would be adding support for dynamic configuration of drives, such as mounting, etc. Eric wasn't sure of exactly what needed to be done but knew the time to do it was during the file management rewrite. Mike McCormack had some test programs for the NT file API's he said he would send to Eric. DLL separation is also a blocker for Wineserver protocol stability. Alexandre didn't feel it was a showstopped for a 0.9 release.

One issue on the to-do list that remained undecided concerned using installers without desktop mode. On the to-do list it's called "window management rewrite". Alexandre seems the only one capable of doing the work, but he's unsure if it's high enough priority for a 0.9 release.

Detecting packages available at run-time is an issue being worked on. Right now OpenGL and ncurses have a "hard" dependency. Mike McCormack is working on the ncurses one. OpenGL is toggleable currently, but future plans include writing a common Direct3D core and making OpenGL a soft dependency. Shachar Shemesh wished there was a list of what packages were required by someone building Wine. He also mentioned some of his bidi work would require another library and asked for some advice on that (see part of the thread below.)

A lot of CVS activity has been going on lately and a few questions popped up concerning that. Right now a big merge is going on with CodeWeavers, Alexandre took a quick look at what's been done. Before the merge there were 21513 line insertions and 8388 deletions affecting 485 files. What remains are 10777 insertions and 4502 deletions on 182 files. However, not all of that is fit to be merged.

Integration with other projects was also a hot topic of discussion. Miguel de Icaza showed up to represent Mono and discuss some of their recent Winforms work (see the related thread in this issue for more info). Miguel was very happy with their current patch because it didn't require much work for them. Alexandre thought the real solution to Mono integration involved a deeper issue and hacking Wine DLL's to turn them into ELF libraries wasn't the way to do it. He went on to mention the need for a way to turn a normal unix app into a winelib app on the fly, basically by dlopening libwine. Jeremy White felt the Mono project might be best off maintaining the patch outside of the Wine tree, So the status quo is that mono has a working Wine interface that is done with a hack. The upside is that mono is productive; the downside is that it will be a maintenance drag.

Steven Edwards showed up to represent the ReactOS project. Currently Steven's work involves splitting up 16/32 bit DLL's. He mentioned that the ReactOS project was primarily concerned with a handful of DLL's: ole* shlwapi, winmm, comctl32, comdlg32 and shell32. At one point Dimi thought a dsp2make utility would be a useful addition and Steven mentioned ReactOS had one. He went on to discuss some future plans, My goal if the ReactOS guys can get more then winhello working is to have WINEs shell32 and comctl32 running for Linux world.

All in all the meeting was quite successful and a lot of people were glad to be able to converse in real time about a lot of issues. Often times agreement in the Wine community comes in the form of no disagreement. Based on that, few people seemed to take issue with Wine's direction. Work is moving in parallel in a lot of different directions. As usual, you can most likely expect a Wine release some time in the next decade.

Jeremy Newman dropped a note to let everyone know he upgraded the Bugzilla database:

A couple people complained they couldn't search for bugs without being logged in. Dimi thought it made a hard system to use even harder. Dan Kegel pointed out the reason for it was to prevent robots from harvesting email addresses. In the end, Jeremy removed the restriction so bugs could be linked from other pages.

There appears to be a bigger problem though. Apparently some bugs have lost a lot of the information associated with them. Jeremy thought the info still resided in the database but Bugzilla wasn't pulling it out. Random discussion in the tech meeting brought forth the suggestion of just dumping the current Bugzilla DB and starting over. Stay tuned, this thread will likely continue.

Mike Hearn posted a note about some work that OpenLink did for the Mono project:

Vladimir Kaluzhny did a lot of the work. Miguel de Icaza mentioned he was happy with the outcome because it just solved the problem. Alexandre didn't feel the patch was ready for inclusion in the main Wine branch though. The decision for the Mono folks to maintain the patch separately.

Shachar Shemesh took up internationalization support for Wine to provide bi-di support. We covered this last fall, and at the time Shachar wanted to use the FriBiDi library. He took some time off, but now he's back at it again. This time around he's considering using a different library - International Components for Unicode. Shachar also had questions about linking in the library and where to call it from. Alexandre just wanted to see something working and felt the rest could be worked out later, As I said, I want to see working code first. And frankly, this ICU library sounds pretty broken, I'm not sure you want to use that.

Shachar wrote back to describe the direction he's taking: