Tom Spear [mailto:speeddymon@gmail.com] wrote:
I just remembered reading somewhere (wiki, perhaps?) that the ultimate goal
of wine
(aside from documenting the windows api, etc) was to provide open-source
drop-in
replacements for windows' core dll's. If that is the case, do we have a
framework
setup for building the wine dlls as windows .dll files, so that we could
test the
actual status of this?
I think it would be interesting to see how much of windows will run with
wine's dlls
in their current state. Obviously it would be bad to test this with
something like
user32.dll, etc, but something like riched32 and maybe some of the common
controls
dlls should be ok to test with?
There is a winapi/msvcmaker perl script in Wine which can create the Visual C 6.0 make files for most (probably not all anymore since the directory structure changed a lot in the last years) DLLs and support libraries in Wine.
Patrik Stridvall put a lot of effort into this and for most non core DLLs it actually did work at some point fairly well. You just had to make sure to either use Perl tools under Windows or configure the Unix directory that contained Wine to be shared to the Windows box with DOS end of line translation since the Visual C 6.0 IDE is very picky about those .dsp and .dsw files and simply crashes in a fatal way (leaving a zombie process you have to kill before you can restart it again) if those files do not look exactly as it expects them.
At some point I tried to adapt those tools to some changes in the Wine directory structure but more would have been needed including certain changes to include file order and such to make it work well. In general since there are not many people using that approach it tends to be an uphill battle to keep it working with Wine internal changes and new PSDK releases and I have not followed that anymore for maybe 2 years.
I believe that the use of MingW will be probably more successful since it is both used to create the crosstests and for Winlib applications/libraries but I haven't done anything with Winelib and only tried once to build the crosstests.
Rolf Kalbermatter