I posted this to comp.emulators.ms-windows.wine, but got no reply.
I'd been having problems with a windows application that want's to
pass off a URL to a browser (netscape).
OK I figured out part of my problem. [In short, I
have an windows application that spawn netscape with
some command-line url]. As was suggested in this
thread, I had to install a windows version of
netscape (I only had the linux native version
installed).
The installation set up the registry and things work
(well sort of, netscape complains about not being
able to write to the tmp directory e: [which is
/tmp]).
The problem now is that I seem to be on the slippery
slope; i.e., most of the plugins/helper applications
are absent, so in order to see various file types I
have to download more windows versions of things
already on my system. None of this would be
necessary if there was some way to get wine to first
try a native program; e.g., before trying
netscape.exe or whatever was in the registry, try
netscape using a standard unix system call; only if
this failed would wine look for a windows version.
Alternately the order could be reversed (I'd be more
than willing to remove the windows versions of
netscape).
The best solution, would be some sort of override
capability be added to the config file, for example,
similar to the way native vs windows .dll's are
chosen.
I'm willing to play around with this, but have no experience with the
internals of wine. Can somebody point me to the right point of the
source code? It'd probably be trivial (and less likely to mess up
wine) to first try to fork off a linux command (e.g., by mapping the
end of command to something lowercase and less the .exe or .com
suffix) and if that failed resort to the windows command.
David
P.S., I don't subscribe to this list, so please CC me.