Obligatory [LWN.net]

Obligatory

Posted May 26, 2006 23:27 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

WTF? Qt is multiplatform by definition. It should be actually faster to recompile and fix simple incompatibilities than use WINE.

Obligatory

Posted May 27, 2006 0:29 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Not really. WINE means you can run your software "as is" - without any recompilation or modification. Just fix few bugs in WINE. QT & GL means eventually you'll get native application but meanwhile you need to remove all Windows-dependences from code. And this can be long story if application was not developed with portability in mind.

Obligatory

Posted May 27, 2006 14:10 UTC (Sat) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

You seem to be agreeing with Chris DiBona's quote. That is, additional fixes to WINE would not help with porting Google Earth to Linux because the app uses Qt.

Obligatory

Posted May 27, 2006 14:30 UTC (Sat) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]

Unfortunately it appears as if Google Earth will indeed be another WINE-based "port", despite Google Earth using cross-platform libraries like Qt and expat. Quoting the Wine Newsletter:

"Interestingly, Google Earth is suffering from an OpenGL and Wine windowing problem that's a showstopper for a ton of other programs. It's a regression in Wine that dates back about a year ago to when window management code was modified to perform better. There should be some nice collateral damage from fixing that bug. You might be able to get a sneak preview of Google Earth on Linux if you start tracking CVS."

Source: http://www.winehq.com/?issue=314

I have no idea what they're smoking.

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Posted May 27, 2006 15:24 UTC (Sat) by hansl (subscriber, #5086) [Link]

What's wrong with using Wine? It's the fastest and cheapest
way to port a Windows app to Linux, and if you use Winelib
you can gradually replace Windows dependencies by Unix dependencies
(say, library by library), eventually eliminating the need for
Wine(lib).

What's wrong with that?

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Posted May 31, 2006 3:47 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

But if you are ALREADY using cross-platfrom toolkit (Qt) and a lot of tools from free software word (try strings on windows's GoogleEarth) then surely it's better to spend little more time to create native port. Usage of Windows version of Qt with winelib just looks sooo wrong... surely Google is not stupid enough to go this way ?

Obligatory

Posted May 27, 2006 18:57 UTC (Sat) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

If Google Earth is a Wine-based application, then how does the Mac version work? Unless Google has managed to port Wine to powerpc code, which would be an impressive feat in itself...

Obligatory

Posted May 28, 2006 9:41 UTC (Sun) by LetterRip (guest, #6816) [Link]

If they are using winelib, then they can recompile to winelib.

winelib has been ported to OS X, but not sure how well it works.

LetterRip

Chris was trying to say...

Posted May 30, 2006 1:08 UTC (Tue) by dank (guest, #1865) [Link]

... that Google Earth will be a native port, not a Wine
port. The Wine weekly news folks are incorrect in
assuming that Google Earth will use Wine.

Chris was trying to say...

Posted Jun 1, 2006 14:44 UTC (Thu) by vinn (guest, #23971) [Link]

"the Wine weekly news folks".. that would be me, Dan. Wanna share some details on wine-devel? Will it use Wine at all?

Regarding Picasa and simply recompiling it, you can't. Maybe the front-end has some cross-platform code, but the backend clearly relies on Win32 API's, including MSHTML.