Request for discussion: Using PE libraries for Wine dependencies

[Zebediah Figura]

On 4/12/20 8:00 PM, Esme (they/them) wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 6:27 PM Zebediah Figura <z.figura12 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> (2) not prompting for every add-on (personally I feel that two is
>> already too many),
> 
> Now that you mention it, I can't think of any reason we couldn't
> combine the prompts for the addons we have. We just need someone to do
> the work. The hard part is giving appwiz.cpl the ability to test for
> all addons including in shared locations, and chaining the steps
> together.

Well, I guess one reason is they're not all necessary. Of course, Wine 
has a default position of "ship everything" anyway, so maybe I should 
just bite the bullet and accept that...

> 
>> I think some sort of manifest hack would be appropriate here, that ntdll
>> would check when loading a builtin DLL. Presumably we don't even want
>> the libraries to be copied into the prefix, but rather we want to make
>> sure we load them always from /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/* (or whatever
>> the path is for any given distribution).
> 
> Maybe. The dependencies of those dependencies would also have to be
> loaded from system paths (builtin,distro,native search order?). We'd
> need the ability to use a list of paths for people who supply their
> own versions of the PE libraries, outside the paths controlled by the
> distribution. I'm not sure if we need to be concerned about how
> Windows programs will respond to seeing library dependencies resolved
> in a way that doesn't happen on Windows.
> 
> I still think an archive of PE dependencies has merit with this
> solution. You'd just have to extract it to /usr/local/, I guess.
> 

I guess it's not obvious to me there's a difference between "builtin" 
and "distro" (though we'd presumably not go putting the Wine builtin 
flag in mingw libraries). But yeah, I guess we'd want to vary load order 
depending on whether the library is a dependency of a PE builtin or not, 
in some way.