quick question: is there any progress on implementing COM, in wine, or is it necessary to grab dcom98.exe and to find the headers and the .libs from visual studio? and have you seen these - IDL files defined by wez, for DCOM?
http://freedce.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/freedce/freedce/dcom/
l.
p.s. nice to hear from you again, rob :)
p.p.s. below is "background" behind where i'm coming from with the python mshtml "thing".
so there are some _really_ weird esoteric "sub-questions" involved, such as: "what are the chances of porting pywin32 - specifically pywin32's COM bindings - to linux, thanks to widl and friends"? see http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32 many thanks for any advice and information.
We already build a typelib for mshtml using widl and pywin32 can use that to make bindings for use at runtime, so it "should" work, but I fail to see the need for it at the moment.
you have to jump through a series of hoops to get there - being honest i'm not that good at expressing some of my leaps of multi-hoop-jumping but i'll try to give some pointers.
1) making python apps that rely on features of the win32 platform possible under unix as well. winreg and dcom are two that _really_ spring to mind.
win32 developers are writing applications that use e.g. the registry. i tried compiling pywin32 on linux and _instantly_ ran into a difficulty: import _winreg.
so, i would have to go into the python 2.5 / 2.6 tarball and look at a way of adding --enable-wine=yes and see what happens.
2) "ActiveScripting" of web pages - DOM manipulation through other programming languages.
this is an _incredibly_ powerful concept that microsoft must have had for what... ten to fifteen years, and nobody really noticed its significance?? :) the reason for _that_ is because the main available programming languages were utterly dire (Visual Basic).
to give you an idea of how powerful scripted DOM manipulation is, i've implemented a project called Pyjamas-Desktop - http://pyjd.org. it's a Desktop Widget Set UI framework. thanks to webkit-glib and pywebkitgtk, is actually _more_ feature-capable than PyQT4 and PyGTK2 put together!
i'd just... _really_ like to see Pyjamas-Desktop be capable of running on top of MSHTML, on windows. especially because then it would be possible to _just_ install python (and pyjd) and, thanks to I.E. being de-facto already _on_ windows, pyjd would just... _work_.
i wouldn't have to ask people to download a 30mb bundle of GTK.DLL, CAIRO.DLL, PANGO.DLL, GDK.DLL, WEBKIT.DLL, ICU38.DLL plus supporting infrastructure. the "dll hell" burden, for gtk appplications on win32, is _immense_.
btw whilst i use pyjamas-desktop as an example, anything that has _remotely_ a subset of the features that pyjd covers would of course benefit from the same features [that python bindings to mshtml.dll would bring]. pyjd is a bit of a "path-finder" as it absolutely _hammers_ the underlying DOM model technology. [i had enormous difficulty finding suitable technology: pykde didn't work; pygtk2 was useless; pyqt4 was only slightly better - in the end i had to go for webkit.]