Dear MSYS2 folks, We are a very small group of Wine contributors, who want to improve Wine in order to support MSYS2 and other development tool sets as more as possible. Our vision is to support Linux/Unix developers to use Wine as a development and testing platform when working on cross platform projects like LibreOffice, Firefox and so on, we hope the more developers using and testing Wine, the better Wine will be.
After several weeks of hacking, we have an initial proof of concept here, bringing experimental support of MSYS2 on top of Wine: https://github.com/fracting/wine-fracting/wiki/MSYS2-on-Wine The current status is between a toy and a tool. For example, gcc.exe, gdb.exe and clang.exe works, but git.exe doesn't work, we have to use git from the host system; pacman.exe works but gpgme doesn't, we have to disable gpg check in /etc/pacman.conf. makepkg works but xz fail on multithreading, we need to tweak /etc/makepkg.conf to disable mulitithreading xz; etc. Besides above, many other things are currently buggy as well. But at very least, start from today, with documented workarounds applied, one can successfully build the `file` package in MSYS2 on top of Wine. As a side note, Cygwin also partially works in the same configuration above. Our naive goal is to build the full open source stack on top of Wine in a couple of years. This is a very hard goal, we try to work from small and easy tasks, we try to build from bottom to top, we try to attack potential contributors. As MSYS2 is so important inside the stack, we would love to here your voice and maybe seeking for your help, which is appreciated very much: * Could you compile and install Wine according to our temporary documentation in our temporary branch, play with MSYS2, then share your experience and opinion? https://github.com/fracting/wine-fracting/wiki/MSYS2-on-Wine For example, tell us how much do you hate wineconsole, or how much do you hate the current bad performance of Wine ;-) Also, which bug is currently most annoying to you? In the coming weeks, we will improve our temporary hacks to be accepted by main stream Wine or Wine-Staging, so normal users have no need to compile Wine by themselves. * Could you please let us know how Wine can help your development work so that we can priority our tasks? Which packages in MSYS2 repo are more high priority to you? Which tools outside of MSYS2 repo are also important to you when developing your project? For example according to my test x64dbg (http://x64dbg.com/ ) works on Wine but not perfect, npackd (https://npackd.appspot.com/ ) works on Wine but not fully tested, chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/ ) doesn't work yet and it is hard to support in a short time, etc. (No, don't tell us which proprietary Windows game is most important to you, that's obvious not our goal <grin>) * If you found a specific Wine bug trigger by a specific package in MSYS2 repo and you happen to know that package very well, could you help us diagnosis that Wine bug? For example, currently helping for diagnosing mintty.exe in Wine is great appreciated. * Mentoring students to work on open source. Our manpower is limited, and we understand MSYS2 folks' time is also limited and precious. In order to grow up the open source community, we are planing to attract and train university students to work on open source projects, especially work on the idea of "full stack on Wine". Usually working on Wine is very hard because we are debugging on closed source software like Microsoft Office or World of Warcraft. Wine was too hard for newbie students, now we try to change the difficulty a little bit by focus on supporting open source software like MSYS2 instead of closed source software like WOW. Students would be ask to run test suites from MSYS2 packages like `file` or `bsdtar` on top of Wine, then fix test failures by hacking on Wine, and fix valgrind warnings by hacking on MSYS2 packages. In order to play this plan, we need mentors from both side, is any of you possible to volunteer not too much of your time as a mentor, by providing advise to newbie students on debugging MSYS2 packages, and by reviewing patches from newbie students? In the past we have a few experience on encouraging and mentoring new students to work on open source project: http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=Jactry+Zeng http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=Zhenbo+Li http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=Shuai+Meng http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=author&s=Yonghao+Hu But those above were not related to the plan of "full stack on Wine" because we didn't have that idea in the past. Now we are considering this plan seriously and planing to call for more students. * If you have any successful experience to use Wine as a development tool, please don't hesitate to share your story. We are currently only a very small group. Any positive feedback would encourage the motivation on this plan and convince more Wine developers to work on the plan! At this time, LibreOffice developers already use Wine as a test platform: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/e/ee/LibreOffice-FOSDEM-2013-MinGW-Wine.pdf Firefox developers also use Valgrind + Wine to diagnose memory bugs for Windows build. Bitcoin community use Wine as a testing tool in Travis CI. Git for Windows use Wine to test as well: https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/blob/master/wine-start.sh And more projects use Wine to test their Windows build: https://github.com/search?q=filename%3A.travis.yml+wine&type=Code&ref=searchresults But we haven't here anybody who is crazy enough to develop Win32 code on top of Wine directly yet ;-) * Any other thoughts on how the two communities can help with each other are great appreciated! Thanks for your great work on MSYS2 and looking forward to your voice! P.S.: I'm usually online in #msys2@OFTC and #winehackers/#wine-staging/#wine-zh@freenode, my nickname is fracting on IRC, feel free to ping me or mail me if you have any further suggestion or request! However I live in GMT+8 so I may be away of keyboard when you are online ;-) -- Regards, Qian Hong - http://www.winehq.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Msys2-users mailing list Msys2-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msys2-users
