Winlib, winebuild and linux shared libraries questions

[Paulo de Carvalho]

whitnl73 at juno.com wrote:


> Not a matter of allowed.  .dll.so libraries don't export the windows
> functions as elf symbols, so you need winemaker to resolve them.

(These little answers with common knowledge which is not written 
anywhere are invaluable pieces of information :) )

 > What do you have against winelib?

Are you kidding?!? You must be joking! I have dreams at night with a 
world in which you don't need to have Windows to run some application. 
Wine and winelib are making my dreams come true. :)

> Do you want to distribute something without dragging all of winelib
> along?  I guess yo can limit the winelib dll's you need, but remember
> you will need wine (and at least the winelib dll's it links to
> directly) ("ldd /usr/local/bin/wine")) to ... 

I am aware of that. That's not the problem...

> What is it you are trying to do?  
 > This is getting too abstract for me.

Ok, you're right. I'm sorry.

What I really want is to use some proprietary 3rd party windows dlls in 
JAVA through JNI (Java Native Interface) and I want to do it using 
Linux. ( Gosh! How this sounds absurd! )

But suppose you would want to use those 3rd party libraries in Perl, or 
Python, or PHP, or something like that, on Linux, I believe you would 
also need some kind of extension mechanism based on libraries. If so, 
link-against-wine-libs-and-lauch-with-wine method wouldn't work, I guess.

I already made some sample applications that use those 3rd party dlls, 
ported them using winelib and they run fine under wine :))
But, as you've said, these applications have to be linked with wine libs 
and they need a wine command to be launched.

Well, working with JNI, involves creating a library. Using a library, I 
can't use the wine command to setup the windows environment these dlls 
expect so I must do this in some other way.

You already said I can't use the library <appname.so> winemaker creates 
because it's an "Unix library in format not in content" so, this won't do.

That's why I was thinking in taking the wine code needed to setup the 
virtual windows environment and put it in the _init proc on a shared 
library...

  "If a function ``_init'' is exported in a library, then it is called 
when the library is first opened (via dlopen() or simply as a shared 
library)." - Program-Library-HOWTO

but many questions arise...

- Can _init proc be used to do something like this ?
- Which pieces of wine code should I put in the _init proc ?
- Is the _init proc behavior is compatible with wine way of doing things?
- How JNI will react to something like this ?


> As it said in the snippet you quoted to start this, a wine dll is a
> win32 dll encapsulated inside a Unix library.

... only to be used with wine!

IMO this sentence should be changed, since it can be misinterpreted 
(well, at least I did). It should be added what you've said: a Unix 
library in format not in content.


Thank you!
Paulo