Wine versions and Debian

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 4:56 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 03:18:19PM -0400, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> Ah, that explains it. Funny, though, building Wine has never been
>> difficult when I've tried it, is this a new problem?
>
> Apparently.  Especially the new 64bit wine support (which is neat
> to have).
>
> Building wine itself isn't so hard, but all the wine .exe tools that it
> uses are windows executables and hence need mingw.

It was never a big deal when people were on IA-32; consider the mix of:
a) IA-32 architecture,
b) Windows code, compiled on and for IA-32,
c) Linux kernel and libraries, running on IA-32,
d) WINE, compiled on and for IA-32

With IA-32 everywhere, everything matches, so there's no issue getting
it all to work.

When you change some of those layers to run x86-64, things get
somewhat hairier.  Not *alway* hairy - I had an appalling moment a few
years ago when I realized someone had taken PostgreSQL + Slony-I
compiles done on a RHAS (Red Hat Advanced Server) IA-32 system, and
installed them in a "looking somewhat production-y" fashion, on an HP
Opteron box running SuSE/x86-64.

I was more than just nominally amazed that, despite two layers of
mistakes (e.g. - wrong architecture, as well as wrong distribution),
it had all worked with a sufficient lack of flaws that nobody had had
reason to even notice the mistake.

Sometimes the mismatch "just gets handled."  Someone had to do some
amount of work to get that to be the case.  But, as in my "appalling
moment," sometimes it's mighty transparent.

(The other characteristic case is with IBM AIX.  On AIX, you can mix
32 and 64 bit binaries with quite a lot of impunity.  Sometimes there
are *spectacularly weird* memory management issues that come up.  But
quite often,  you can even run 32 bit binaries, and seemingly mostly
have access to 64-bit-flavoured services.  IBM put a lot of work into
this stuff.  They've got a group that deeply understands this sort of
thing.  I don't want ever to...)

It appears that in the case of WINE, one or another of those
interactions that I noted above aren't quite so transparent :-(.
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