[Fedora-packaging] Re: supporting closed source operating systems?

Yaakov Nemoy loupgaroublond at gmail.com
Mon Jul 14 20:30:32 UTC 2008


On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 10:11 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Yaakov Nemoy <loupgaroublond at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you can show a demo of compiling certain open source windows apps
>> so that they can work on Fedora via wine, then I can definitely argue
>> that this is no longer secondary architecture.
>>
>> I have a couple of VJ programs some friends asked about getting into
>> Fedora, all open source, but some run on windows.  Being able to build
>> them on Fedora easily will make it very easy for them to create a
>> Fedora based VJ station.
>
> I will fight you tooth and nail on this. It might even come down to a
> Dance Dance Revolution Dance off.  If we can distribute it under the
> Fedora brand, we must have a version that runs natively before we
> consider a windows cross-compiled binary that runs under wine.  I
> personally draw the line there. Native first, emulated second. If
> native doesnt work, get it fixed, or its not going to be part of
> Fedora.

Frets on Fire.

Seriously, we might as well write the program over from scratch,
cannabalizing the algorithms from it as we go along.  Doing that would
probably mean making a free-codec and nonfree-codec version too.
Currently, it's supported by searching in all the usual windows places
to see if codecs are installed.

Now that wine is 1.0, I think it really deserves the same pariah
status that Mono should get.  It's an API controlled by a single
corporation that is not 100% documented, complex, and been
reimplemented from the inside out.  Where do we draw the line between
Mono compiling EXEs and DLLs that work under .Net on Windows and a
cross compiler compiling EXEs and DLLs that work on windows without
.Net?  If you really want to make this argument, why don't we draw the
line at Mono?.

(Before anyone brings it up, Gstreamer's latency is too high for some
of the things these guys are doing, which is a shame because it's just
modular enough to make things like this less messy.)

-Yaakov




More information about the Fedora-packaging mailing list