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

On 11/27/05, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> You don't have to use VC++ to build Windows binaries, that's a bizarre
> idea. You can use cross-compilers to do it on Linux just as well.
> I've built Win32 PE binaries on Linux before, it's actually quite easy.
> Now whether the Mozilla build system specifically can cope with that, I
> don't know. But that's an unrelated problem.

Interesting. What kind of cross compiler would you need in wine then?
Are there any distribtions already shipping such a cross compiler? If
wine is going to do this, we should make sure that we can actually
build those binaries. Or did I miss something important at this point?

 Do you expect that distributions have to ship precompiled binaries?

> > Yes. Speaking of OSS, it's in the packagers responsibility to decide what to
> > build and what to provide in a package and what not.
>
> I strongly disagree with this idea, it introduces middle-men into the
> system for no good reason.
> [...]
> Put another way, I've wasted far, far too many hours of my life debugging
> problems in Wine introduced by distributors and 3rd party packagers who
> arbitrarily overrode upstream decisions they knew nothing about.

I think we should discuss technical matters in a more calm way. This
way, we more probably get what we all want: good packages for our
users. I understand that you are disappointed by distributors who
cripple your software, but you also have to understand, that
distributors have to adapt the source they get from upstream to fit in
the distribution well. So lets work together to get the best wine
packages we can make.

--
regards,
    Reinhard