talk-through dll

[Geoff Thorpe]

Hi there,

I've been lurking on the list for some time just watching proceedings but 
this mail interested me more than usual...

On Wednesday 15 May 2002 09:33, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I have been reading over the Wine documentation but have not come
> across this yet.
>
> I am interested in having a windows DLL that can access some
> functions native to Linux.
>
> For instance, possibly an application under wine that allows me to
> add a new user to my Linux box.

I don't know enough of the wine internals to answer you with anything better 
than "I'd have thought so". However conceptually I think this touches on 
something very interesting - not entirely unlike VMware's ability to 
"talk-through" to the host-OS (ie. those dinky tools that let the mouse pass 
in and out of the guest OS, etc). It is interesting at another level - for 
years we have all put up with Micro$oft's "extend" policy towards standards, 
APIs, protocols, etc. In this respect Wine also suffers in some sense because 
it will always be chasing the various APIs and behaviours as MS mutates them 
over time.

Won't it be wonderful when some applications will actually work *better* 
under Wine than in native windows? Ie. under native windows, "click here" 
will just open IE or whatever, but under wine with a "talk-through" API, it 
could instead allow the browsing to be hosted either through the 'normal' 
windows API (presumably launching IE) *or* be passed out to a native browser 
of choice on the host system (mozilla, konqueror, whatever).

There's lots of stuff on *nix systems that would enhance a windows 
application beyond what you get in a windows system (expensive add-ons not 
withstanding). One merely needs to think of text-editors (Visual Studio 
inside wine could launch native emacs/vi editors perhaps?), protocol clients 
(ssh, telnet, audio/video streaming, wget), network applications (eg. use the 
user's native mail-client for mailto:*** URLs in win32 apps), etc. Ie. 
handing the full facilities of your host *nix system to the applications you 
run under wine. This truly would make win32 (or the illusion of it provided 
by wine) a better application environment than MS can or will make it.

Nice idea, I hope you have some luck with it.

Cheers,
Geoff