Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have an embedded system that I am developing that uses Windows based compilers. Unfortunately, WinNT bluescreens too much for me to be able to work, so I have ported the project to using Gnu Make, with the compilers being executed via Wine.
The problem is that the compilers search the path for their sub-components (just like GCC does - the driver calls the preprocessor, compiler, assembler, etc.).
Now, the location of the project within the filesystem is not fixed - it depends upon where the developer checks it out. The project has the compilers stored along with the code, so the project is "self-contained". The project has a shell script that sets several environment variables describing the location of the project, and adds the needed directories to the Unix path. However, Wine (wisely) does not make that path available to the Windows program, so when the compiler driver looks for the preprocessor, it bombs.
As a work-around, I've stated the the developers must install the tools into a fixed directory, and add that directory to the Windows path as defined in ~/.wine/config. However, it would be nice if the setup shell script could add the tools directory within the project automatically to the Wine path.
Has any thought been given to honoring a WINEPATH (or similar) environment variable, which would be added to the Wine path at runtime?
On a related note: would it be possible to have a means to tell the wineserver process to "hang around" for a few seconds after the last wine process using it has terminated? Again, in this make process you get lots of "start wine, start compiler, compile, exit. Start wine, start compiler, compile, exit" operations - if the wineserver stuck around for 2 seconds after the last wine process terminated, this would aviod starting and stopping the wineserver process.