Bringing Wine into Main

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Dec 15, 2008, at 10:22 AM, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> ...
> There's also great potential to build upon Wine as a platform for
> porting applications.  In theory, there's nothing stopping us from 
> using Wine as a means of creating a package out of an arbitrary piece 
> of formerly Windows-only software; Google has already done this 
> in-house for Picassa, however we could take it one step further and 
> package everything from the open source eMule to commercial tax 
> software.
> ...

I think it is good for Wine to be more prominent, if it works for most 
programs and if the experience for programs that don't work is 
understandable.

However, promoting Wine as a platform for porting applications would 
defeat our intentions of giving Ubuntu a better user experience than 
any other operating system. For consistency we should be working 
towards fewer and more improvable toolkits over time, not more toolkits 
that are less modifiable. We can enhance GTK and Qt and XUL and VCL, 
because most of the applications that use them are also patchable if 
necessary. But we can't alter Wine's presentation of interface elements 
without risking incompatibility with large numbers of closed-source 
applications.

Better to treat Wine like the Classic environment on Mac OS X -- a 
compatibility layer for running legacy applications until the vendor 
gets around to introducing a native version.

Cheers
-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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