winelpk.dll

[Shachar Shemesh]

Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:

>On Thu, 15 May 2003, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>  
>
>>The attached patch is adding a new DLL, called "winelpk". This DLL is 
>>meant to replace a Windows undocumented DLL called "LPK.DLL", or 
>>Language Pack. LPK.DLL implemented the BiDi for GetCharacterPlacement, 
>>DrawText, EditControl and so on and so forth. As the interfaces there 
>>are undocumented, however, I changed the name of the Wine DLL, to avoid 
>>confusion and attempts to replace one with the other.
>>    
>>
>This doesn't make sense. If we're not compatible with LPK, why add a
>DLL in the first place, and not implement those functions in their
>respective DLLs?
>  
>
It makes a LOT of sense to implement it in a different DLL. It just 
doesn't make sense to rev-eng their interface. They missed up an 
important flag on GetCharacterPlacement, which means it is practically 
impossible to use it as is. This, in turns, creates strange 
dependancies, that can only be easily solved by placing unrelated stuff 
into a single DLL.

When I started working on GetCharacterPlacement, and found out about 
that incompatibility, I was a bit confused as for how Windows did it. 
The answer is that it concentrates everything into a single DLL, and 
does everything in there using undocumented interfaces. We don't want to 
replicate the interfaces, but putting everything into a single DLL does 
make sense.

The idea is that all the GDI APIs are complete without this DLL, except 
they don't support BiDi. All BiDi operations are done in winelpk.dll. 
Plugging out this DLL will leave you with a functionally complete Wine. 
My original idea, though it may still be amended, was that this DLL will 
fail to load if the supporting libraries are not present on the 
Linux/Unix enivironment, leaving Wine BiDiless, but functional. Because 
of the fact that LPK uses GDI and User32 functions, I don't think 
dynamic loading can be avoided anyways, so we might as well take 
advantage of this.

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Open Source integration consultant
Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/