Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org wrote:
Because getting rid of it might make it much easier to turn winelib into a normal library, thus enabling plain old linux apps to at least statically link it in and thereby become able to use windows dlls without having to use the preloader.
We could have that as an option for Winelib apps, though I don't think it would make things really easier, just differently complicated.
The scenario I'm imagining is: Lots of people want to use a particular windows dll in their Linux apps. Joe Developer writes a nice wrapper library using winelib to hide the fact that win32 is involved at all. Fred Developer uses Joe's library in his app. Currently, Fred has to switch his app around to be run via the wine preloader. With the scheme Mike was thinking of in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2255 Fred wouldn't have to do that; he'd only have to link in a static library (named, say, wine-reserve-win32-vma.a), and then link in Joe's library any old way. That sounds a lot easier to me. Did I miss something?