Fwd: Re: Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes the Mozilla ActiveX Control

Carlos, 

I forward this to the Mailing List because it's important that others can see 
your opinion...

As reply to your comment:

I don't mind if the user wants to have ActiveX or not, but there must be a 
split, between a framework which gives you the possibility and functionality 
to run windows applications on a different OS, and windows userland 
apps/libs.

Again, when we're packaging this, we're responsible for the sources, resulting 
binaries of the sources  and for all attached apps/libs, which will be 
packaged together with the sources and resulting binary packages.

Means, the plugin has to be shipped  as binary, because no one can compile 
windows binaries without a windows c/c++ compiler.
Therefore, we can't be sure, that this plugin (even if it's opensource) is 
bugfree or at least has no known bugs.

If something is wrong with this userland application/library, we have to make 
sure, that this userland application/library is fixed, which we can't because 
we don't compile windows applications/libraries.

Seeing those binary applications/libraries bundled with a framework, which 
can't compile those userland stuff out of their own source, there is no way a 
distribution can support this (even then if wine stays in universe, the MOTUs 
are supporting actively their universe).

Your last statement is as well very important. No one can ship a library or 
plugin for something which is not shipped with. So if you think you have to 
ship a plugin for firefox/mozilla with wine, you have to ship mozilla/firefox 
as well with your package, which actually gives me more headaches then ever.

No one denies, that upstream can bundle this in their own responsibilty. But 
for a distribution, which ships this framework, there is no way to support 
what you want.

As I said, when I (re-)package wine, and there is a binary userland package, 
which is not compiled from source, I will not install it in the resulting 
ubuntu package.
Even if sabdfl himself is requesting this, I would deny his request. I, for 
myself, don't want to be responsible for this ;)

Regards,

\sh

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes 
the Mozilla ActiveX Control
Date: Friday 25 November 2005 11:36
From: Carlos Ribeiro <carribeiro at gmail.com>
To: Stephan Hermann <sh at sourcecode.de>

On 11/24/05, Stephan Hermann <sh at sourcecode.de> wrote:
> Thinking about userland windows applications/libraries in a wine package,
> I,
> as packager would remove them. They don't belong to the original source
> package named wine.

Respectfully: the problem is that Microsoft's criteria is different from
yours. The fact that they "bundled" IE into the OS creates an expectation,
on the part of a end user, that wine will also support things such as
ActiveX plugins. So in this case the bundling makes sense. We're just
replicating some functionality that a standard Windows install have by
default.

(of course, this would also mean that wine should "bundle" Firefox (which
would be ridiculous), but I think you got the point)

--
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com

mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com

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