WINEGATE.DLL: Wine gateway to native Unix libraries

[Ben Klein]

2009/2/15 Martin Hinner <martin at hinner.info>:
> If wine-team decides not to include this (or similar .dll) in the Wine
> package, we'll just redistribute it with the application, but I think
> there is need for such library.

You repeat yourself in another post:

2009/2/15 Martin Hinner <martin at hinner.info>:
> I am not pushing on WINEGATE.DLL inclusion in Wine package. If it's
> not included, we'll include it in our installers and problem is
> solved.

You obviously don't understand how Wine works. It's not in win32, nor
is it in any other API standard Wine has to deal with (such as
Directx). It won't be shipped with Wine. If you want to ship it with
your product, that's your prerogative. If you want to release your
project on public domain or under an open-source license such as LGPL,
by all means.

> But I think other developers need such library to make their
> apps. working under Wine and it's much better to have one "standard"
> and well documented library than 10 or 20 proprietary solutions. I
> understand it is not clean solution, but world is not perfect.

A standard like, for example, what was mentioned earlier with
wine_dlopen stuff? I don't know all the details about winelib, but
from what I understand you should be using those.

> My feeling is that Linux desperately needs applications that currently
> run only on Windows.

It's my feeling that it doesn't. "Would be nice", yes, but nowhere
near "desperately needs".

> Companies will not use Linux if they cannot run
> their applications on it. It's like binary drivers.

No it's not.

Businesses in general have never been particularly receptive to stuff
they don't already know (read Microsoft). Vendor lock-in contracts are
quite common. Some contracts (probably most) bar businesses from
installing any other operating system on any machine they run or
suffer heavy fines. There's also cost of retraining staff, tech
support, systems administrators ...

> They are bad, but better than nothing. In an ideal world
> there would be no need for Wine anyway :-).

If you haven't noticed, we don't live in an ideal world. Wine has its
uses, the set of which continues to increase.

Being able to run proprietary drivers where there is no way to run a
device natively on Linux sounds good, but what you're talking about is
essentially wrapping a win32 "driver" around native libs. It would be
better for everyone involved if there was a fully-native Linux library
that supports the device, with appropriate wrappers in winelib,
possibly even using your winegate, if the companies really are that
serious about supporting Linux systems.