Wine & Mingw-w64 Might Tighten Up Their Relationship - Possible "WineSDK"

Developers between the Wine and Mingw-w64 projects are discussing the potential for further embracing their relationship given the overlap in trajectory and both benefiting from close collaboration. This extended relationship could also involve Mingw-w64 potentially adopting Wine's branding.

While all Phoronix readers should be aware of Wine, for those not familiar with Mingw-w64 it's the off-shoot of MinGW focused on 64-bit support and other features over the original MinGW for providing an open-source development toolchain for Microsoft Windows. Mingw-w64 remains quite active in working on its GCC-based compiler toolchain support for Windows.

Developers between Mingw-w64 and Wine have already collaborated to some extent but now there is talk of ramping up that relationship to the benefit of both open-source projects.

Among the items being talked about are Mingw-w64 leveraging Wine's (WineHQ.org) infrastructure rather than SourceForge, potentially re-branding Mingw-w64, sharing more source code between the projects, and collaborating on testing.

In terms of the branding, "WineSDK" was brought up as a possible new name for the Mingw-w64 project to leverage Wine being well known among the open-source/Linux communities. On the source code sharing, it could avoid some code duplication currently happening in both projects.

A definitive decision hasn't been made at this point on any of the items but the Mingw-w64+Wine relationship is being discussed in this mailing list thread.