If you want to help get an application working in Wine, the first thing
you should do is register yourself in the
applications database and use one
of your votes to indicate that you'd like more effort to be spent on
the application. Every once in a while, a Wine developer will finish a
project and look for something to do - combing through the higher voted
apps to find one that people need work on is a great way to spend one's
time and fill up a todo list.
If the application that you want working is not listed in the
applications database, there is an easy to use form available for you to
add it. If the application is in the database, but
lacks a maintainer, you should consider becoming one. If you are
familiar with Wine and have a desire to test the application and help get
or keep it working, please apply by clicking the link in the application's
page. Each application should have a supermaintainer, and, if different
versions of the application are substantially different (such as in
Internet Explorer), each subversion should have a maintainer. Please
don't feel deterred by the need to apply to become a maintainer - the
application form is largely a formality to prevent abuse and we can
virtually guarantee your acceptance.
If you are the developer or publisher of the application, you
obviously have a very big incentive to help get your application working
under Wine. Fortunately, there are many options available to you other
than reporting bugs and hoping someone will fix them. By far the easiest
way is to simply send free copies of your software to Wine developers and
hope they'll take an interest in getting it working. You'd be amazed how
effective this approach can be, particularly for games. An alternative
option, perhaps more effective and expensive, is to pay Wine developers
for their work on your application, either directly through a negotiated
contract or indirectly by posting a bounty. CodeWeavers, a major Wine
developer, offers a special section for pledges at
their compatibility
center website. The most direct method, however, is to help develop
Wine itself and contribute code directly, which is exactly what Corel did
for WordPerfect several years ago. In any case, making a post on the
Wine developers email
list can go a long way.
If your application doesn't work:
If your application experiences problems in a particular area, or fails
to even run at all, there are a number of steps you can take to help us.
The most important thing is to find out where exactly the application is
failing. To diagnose application problems, the first step is to run the
program from the console using Wine, rather than from a gui shortcut.
This will allow Wine to output error messages to the console, the
understanding of which are key to solving the problem and getting the
application to work.
An application may not work because Wine doesn't yet fully implement
one of the DLL files the application is trying to use. If you encounter
a DLL not found error, or see a lot of "FixMe:" messages while running the
application in Wine, this is likely the case. When this occurs, you can
try using native (non-Wine) DLL files in place of Wine's builtin ones.
Check the application database page for the program. There may be
special configuration options or instructions for installing native DLL
files there that you can try to get the application working. For
further configuration help, please see the
Running
Wine section of the User Guide.
If the application still doesn't work, it's probably due to a bug or
deficiency in Wine and we'd like to hear about it. Please see the reporting bugs page for instructions
on how to best report bugs with applications. Alternatively, if you're
a programmer, we'd really like it if you tried to help us directly;
please read the
getting
started with Wine development guide if you're interested.
If your application does work, but with some difficulty:
Sometimes, applications run under Wine but don't function quite as
smoothly as they do in windows. They may have display errors, a feature
may be broken, or they may run unusually slow. These applications should
receive a lower rating from their maintainers ("bronze" or "garbage") in
the Application's Database, depending on the degree of difficulty
encountered.
If you have found a way to make an application work that is more
complicated than simply installing it, please share that information by
posting on the application's page in the database. If you are the
maintainer for the application, please post the instructions in a
"howto" which will appear inside green bars at the top of the
application's page.
If your application used to work, but has since broken in a new
version of Wine:
Wine is a large and complex project, composed of many files written
by different authors. Sometimes, an attempt to change a file and expand
support for one application will unexpectedly cause another application
to stop functioning. These changes are known as "regressions", and they
are unfortunately sometimes found in the Wine source code because the
author of a patch that causes a regression is quite simply unaware of it.
Since the Wine developers can't possibly test every application with every
patch, we have to rely on the community to inform us of when regressions
occur so that the problem can be easily identified and ultimately fixed.
Without community involvement, regressions can go unfixed for potentially
very long periods of time.
If your application has experienced a regression, please try and
provide us with as much information as you can about when and how it
broke. This allows us to isolate the exact thing we screwed up in the
code and provide a fix. Please provide as much as you know about which
version of Wine worked, and which version didn't, including the version
number and how you installed it (from source, binary packages, etc.)
Finally, please post these things in the Application Database page for the
application.
If you wish to be extremely helpful, you can try to isolate the exact
patch which broke your application. This takes quite a bit of time and
effort, but it is quite simply the best way to get your application
working again. When it comes to fixing regressions, the only thing more
helpful to the Wine developers than knowing exactly which patch caused a
regression is receiving a fix for the patch itself. For help with
isolating problem patches, please see the documentation on
regression
testing.