nanogui@linuxhacker.org

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, mark dufour wrote:

> 
> > Moreover it would ve silly to use the mwin/Win32 API for re-writing
> > dev_x11. "dev_x11" is the means through which WINE communicates to the
> > graphics device [right now only X11R6]. (Veerry silly: Winderz native
> > application -> WINE -> dev_x11 -> mwin/Win32 -> hardware)
> it wouldn't be silly because dev_x11 would pass most requests directly to
> mwin/win32 and no conversions to x style of doing things would be
> necessary..
Well, I'll study dev_x11 to-morrow. I do not *think* that WINE is passing
all the Win(16|32) requests to dev_x11 unmodified. It would be too dumb.
However nano-X is very much X11-like and this means among other things
portability... Keep in mind that nano-X/mwin are not yet optimized for
speed [e.g. under some circumstances imagea are drawn PIXEL-BY-PIXEL (see
GrLoadImageFromFile() and the server-side implementation)].

Having WINE on top of nano-X would be fun but useful too -- sometimes X11
just sucks (God forgive me!) and the whole X11 stuff (shared
libs, binaires) occupies huge amount of RAM and storage space.

> wine is a really cool project :-) but most of the wine people are
> currently still working on compatibility. after 7 years of hard work ( not
> by me ) a 1.0 is finally within a years reach! it would be great to have a
> faster, non-x11 graphics driver with the 1.0 release.
I hope very sincerely that they won't get to 1.0 soon: trying to get to
1.0 makes things in WINE move very fast still the so-called ``IT
Analysts'' [80% of them being clueless morons] are not be able to
FUD: "hey WINE is 1.0 and it still does not run Sucking_Win_App_XXX??".

Re-implementing a bloody API (Win16/Win32s/Win32c/Win32/Win2k) is not an
easy job. The WINE guys have a lot of guts and deserve our support and
respect.

mwin is not the Placebo (wonder medicine) for WINE  -- it won't speed it
up faster than X11 or nano-X do. Moreover you are going to fulfill one of
the worst nightmares of mankind: an emulator (WINE) running on top of
another (mwin). Cool, eh? And both try to emulate the same thing [in
theory] -- SuperKool!

Vladimir