wine users - Nov 2009 - Re: Resources for Windows developers to support Wine as a platfo

First point Dotan Cohen.  Wine is not a normal platform.  Treating it as such
gets you into trouble.  Wine is a open source platform.

Wine does get regressions.  One of the most important things is maintaining
appdb entry telling users how to get around problems different wine version to
wine version.  Even in the appdb can tell uses that X version of wine does not
work with his program.  This also provides bug tracking linked to application. 
Support personal of wine always refer to the appdb it see if an application
works.  People buying applications also refer to it.

Hacking around issues is not effective for wine.   Creating test cases and
submitting or repairing wine is helpful.

Basically this is way different to supporting a closed source platform.

Wine is a open source project and need to be treated as such.   Great support
comes from working with upstream.  Ie wine.   Wine developers are responsive.

Problem with patching stuff in own code base to get around wine issue is it only
make your live harder.

The means to turn bits of the application on and off at will through
configuration files or registry not from platform detecting is the correct way
to work around wine problems.  These alterations can also be handy when debuging
on a windows machine with damaged files.

Basically think of wine as windows that has been running on a bad harddrive and
now sections don't work.   But could be repaired in future or could pick up
new damage.  Treat it that way and support wine is not a major trip through
hell.

If supporting wine is avoiding providing Linux version if able.  I seriously
don't recommend it.  Native programs beat wine.   Wine has all the issues of
windows with dll conflicts and other problems.  Wine is also not without its
overhead.

As mentioned, only see it as an option if making the application itself
cross-platform takes too much effort.

About "resources", there aren't really any. I guess there are the
release logs, showing what's new or fixed in each release. Those might be
helpful for the developer to find out if everything his app uses is supported.

Something else you should do: keep testing the app in Wine and see what output
appears on the terminal, then either find workarounds around the things that
don't work or aren't implemented in Wine yet. Make sure it still runs
correctly in Windows too, of course.

Finally (from me at least), be sure to include information with the application
on what version of Wine it works. A regression in a newer Wine or a lack of
features in an older Wine could make the app or (one of) its features not work
correctly.