As maintainer of the Winsock Programmer's FAQ, I have a few interests in
WINE's implementation of Winsock:
1. You state that your Winsock 1.1 implementation is at 90% completion.
What has to be done before you call it 100%?
2. The Wine status page says that the documentation for Winsock in WINE
is somewhere between outdated and nonexistent. What do you need? I ask
because the freely-available Winsock 2 spec should be enough -- WINE
shouldn't need its own docs unless the WINE implementation differs from
the spec. (For those who haven't read the Winsock spec, it's more like
a reference manual than many specs I've seen; pretty easy reading.)
3. What does your Winsock 2 provider support today, and what does it
need in the near future? I.e., Is there any lack in the Winsock 2
provider stopping you from getting to WINE 1.0?
4. What about Winsock 2 support beyond 1.0? I imagine that this
includes things like overlapped I/O, I/O completion ports, and the
Service Provider Interface. Am I close?
For what it's worth, in the Winsock programming community it's pretty
much understood that if you use Winsock 2 features you're almost
certainly tying your application to Windows. If WINE can run Winsock 2
programs, that's nice, but I wouldn't ding it too badly in the FAQ if it
couldn't. The WINE people should take that to mean that I think their
efforts are much better spent elsewhere. Winsock 2 mainly appeals to
high-end server app writers and people with major transport/namespace
compatibility issues. The former shouldn't be running under WINE, ever,
and the latter is a minority of applications.
I'm not yet sure whether I will help with the project or not. (I'll
know after I get the answers to my questions!) However, I can say I'm
more likely to be a help in the documentation area than in the
programming area. Obviously I know a thing or two about Winsock, but
low-level system programming just isn't my bag.
--
= Warren Young, maintainer of the Winsock Programmer's FAQ at:
= http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/programming/winsock/
=
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m
