Drop-in replacement of windows dll's?

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Tom Spear [mailto:speeddymon at gmail.com] wrote:

>I just remembered reading somewhere (wiki, perhaps?) that the ultimate goal
of wine
>(aside from documenting the windows api, etc) was to provide open-source
drop-in
>replacements for windows' core dll's.  If that is the case, do we have a
framework
>setup for building the wine dlls as windows .dll files, so that we could
test the
>actual status of this?
>
>I think it would be interesting to see how much of windows will run with
wine's dlls
>in their current state.  Obviously it would be bad to test this with
something like
>user32.dll, etc, but something like riched32 and maybe some of the common
controls
>dlls should be ok to test with?

There is a winapi/msvcmaker perl script in Wine which can create the Visual
C 6.0 make
files for most (probably not all anymore since the directory structure
changed a lot
in the last years) DLLs and support libraries in Wine.

Patrik Stridvall put a lot of effort into this and for most non core DLLs it
actually
did work at some point fairly well. You just had to make sure to either use
Perl tools
under Windows or configure the Unix directory that contained Wine to be
shared to the
Windows box with DOS end of line translation since the Visual C 6.0 IDE is
very picky
about those .dsp and .dsw files and simply crashes in a fatal way (leaving a
zombie
process you have to kill before you can restart it again) if those files do
not look
exactly as it expects them.

At some point I tried to adapt those tools to some changes in the Wine
directory
structure but more would have been needed including certain changes to
include file
order and such to make it work well. In general since there are not many
people using
that approach it tends to be an uphill battle to keep it working with Wine
internal
changes and new PSDK releases and I have not followed that anymore for maybe
2 years.

I believe that the use of MingW will be probably more successful since it is
both used
to create the crosstests and for Winlib applications/libraries but I haven't
done
anything with Winelib and only tried once to build the crosstests. 

Rolf Kalbermatter