On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 12:48:32PM +1000, Frank Copeland wrote: > wine has a long way to go before it provides a general replacement for > windows, but frankly that doesn't bother me one bit since I won't be using > it for that. Even so wine does two things that make it extremely useful > right now. One is that it allows people like Corel to port their > applications written for the windows API to linux without too much pain. In > fact much of the recent improvement in wine can be attributed to Corel.
This is IMO the main function of WINE -- it's essentially a kit for porting Windows software to Linux, for certain values of Windows software. This is similar to the verso of Unix compatibility kits for Windows. Distinction being that the POSIX API is a well-documented and modularized standard, while the Win32 API is an undocumented, proprietary, tangled mess. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks! http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
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