On 4/18/06, Mike Hearn mike@plan99.net wrote:
The GIMP now has the ability to use Photoshop plugins using Wine. And so on.
As you point out later, Photoshop's plugins are out of process (http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/pspi.html) so that's not a good example of the problem you're trying so solve. (They make the mistake of shipping a winelib executable, but that's a minor sin.)
It'd be nice if there was a simple API programs could use to do this, for instance, wine_dlopen("whatever.dll"), wine_adopt_thread() and so on to make re-use of Win32 components and COM objects easy.
This has been discussed before and Alexandre wasn't sure it was worth it as it'd be a significant extension to the (stable??) Wine APIs
I still think it's an excellent idea, albeit difficult.
so IMHO this one shouldn't be judged on whether it gets checked in or not but rather whether it works and how easy it is to use.
I wouldn't put it that way. I'd continue "and if it clearly makes the world a happy place, Alexandre will naturally change his mind".
Thoughts? I know roughly what needs to be done so I could mentor this one, but students be warned - it requires _excellent_ understanding of operating system design and things like threading. There's a reason such a thing doesn't already exist, and it's because it's hard. On the flip side it's not a massive amount of code IMHO so the work would mostly involve learning, debugging, etc rather than simply being a hard typing slog.
Yep, it would take a special student for this one.
Such a thing has many uses:
- Hosting ActiveX controls inside a native Firefox
Now that's an evil use :-)
On the whole, I hope this happens. It would be an interesting experiment. - Dan