testing bzr under Wine

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> One way to improve things on performance could be for
> non-Windows-native developers to sometimes run things through Wine.
> It's very quick and easy:
> 
> 1- sudo apt-get install wine
> 2- go to python.org in a web browser and click the python2.6 windows
> msi; if your mime-types are aligned the browser will ask if you want
> to run it through wine; say yes.
> 3- create a shell script or alias that does
> 
>   exec wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Python26/python.exe "$@"
> 
> Then
> 
>   cd ~/bzr/trunk
>   winepython ./bzr st
> 
> and it just works!
> 
> I do recognize that this is not the whole story about good Windows
> user experience, which also includes packaging, the ui, integration,
> etc.  Some of these unix-oriented bzr and python developers are
> probably constitutionally incapable of seeing with a beginner's mind;
> some of them require testing from an installer or on a VM.  It also
> may not precisely correspond to Windows behaviour, and I'm not sure
> how hard it would be to build the extensions.
> 
> But it may get us a bit closer, and has the big advantage that it
> shares the same source trees you're using from Unix and you can use
> your regular comfortable editor and environment, and immediately test
> the same code under both interpreters.
> 
> There are some test failures.
> 
> I'm going to try dogfooding this at least some of the time.
> 

So the #1 question is whether it preserves all of the Windows behaviors
about files even under linux. For example:
  1) Can you rename/delete an open file?
  2) Can you rename the directory when you have a file inside it held
     open?
  3) Is a read lock exclusive with a write lock inside the same process?

Those are the primary source of windows failures at the moment. I'm
going to try to submit my locking warnings (it got blocked yesterday by
Launchpad having problems).

There is also the:
  4) Can you overwrite a file by renaming over it. (and can you do it
     when the file is already open.)

If these all hold true, then it does seem like wine would be sufficient
for running the test suite.

John
=:->
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