What does it take to run a third-party DLL under Wine?

[Gaul, Ken]

So can this winlib app be made into a winlibapp.so that could be say
loaded by a java app or does it actually have to be an executable
binary?

Ken.

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 17:55, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, John Conneely wrote:
> 
> > 1)       Port the code to Linux.  I eliminated this as a choice because
> > we don't have the source code for the DLL.
> > 2)       Use some kind of RPC mechanism (COBRA, SOAP, etc.) to have the
> > DLL running under windows on a server.  This would work in principle,
> > and apparently it is the preferred solution by the maker of the DLL.
> > However, it violates our client's no-Microsoft-code mandate, and our
> > customer has rejected this as a solution.
> > 3)       Write a wrapper to use the DLL running under WINE.  This is
> > what I am pursuing now.
> 
> Currently, you can not call a native (PE) DLL directly from a Linux (ELF)
> app -- you can do that esaily from a Winelib app. So you have two choices:
>   A) Make your app a Winelib app. If you can do this, you need nothing
>      more, you can simply use the .DLL as is. This might not be a big
>      deal, it changes a little the way you link the app, and places some
>      restrictions on what it can do/link with, but you may be able to
>      live with it.
>   B) If you want to keep your app a non-Winelib app, you will have to
>      go for (2). The advantage is that initially you can test your RPC
>      solution against real Windows, and when done, simply replace
>      Windows with Wine. It's an incremental approach that leaves your
>      choices open in terms of final deployment. The trick here is to
>      choose the RPC mechanism carefully so you don't use stuff that is
>      not currently implemented/stable in Wine, otherwise you will not
>      be able to replace Windows with Wine.
> 
> Of course, all this assumes that the DLL does not make use of unimplemented
> functionaliy in Wine. If it does, you will need to put more work into fixing
> that. If your current Windows app works under Wine as it stands now, then
> you are OK.
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