Fwd: Re: [putty]Winelib support + patch

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On December 2, 2002 02:03 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Yes, it would be possible to resolve imports directly through the ELF
> tables and avoid our own separate import mechanism; basically this
> would be a PE-aware ld.so. It's quite a bit of work though, and
> portability is an issue.

Yes, having a PE-aware ld.so would allow us to bypass our import
mechanism. But I guess the question was: given that we don't have
such a ld.so, can we handle import of variables through our current
import mechanism?

Since you mentioned portability, I would like to add that while
worrying about compatibility makes sense, holding back features
for long periods for the hope of finding the perfect portable
solution probably hurts everyone.

Past experience has shown that having a working version for the
dominant OS (Linux for us), is the way to go. The other systems
will find a way of emulating the behavior faster (and better!)
than we can figure out a good portable solution. We had the same
debate about threading long ago, and at that time I was advocating
using clone(2), but due to portability reasons threading support
was delayed substantially. In the end, we ended up using clone,
and it showed that (1) the hard part was to do the locking, and
that was shared by all systems anyway, so progress on that front,
even if only on Linux initially, helped _all_ systems, and
(2) the *BSD folks come up with a solution in no time.

I know, it sounds selfish, but I think the best approach for
everybody is to go ahead and implement it only on Linux if
there isn't an obvious portable solution. The other systems
will follow sooner rather than later. In the end, everybody
wins.

-- 
Dimi.