WINEGATE.DLL: Wine gateway to native Unix libraries

[Martin Hinner]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 6:31 AM, Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/14 Martin Hinner <martin at hinner.info>:
>>  Purpose of this Wine DLL is to allow Windows applications to use
>> directly Unix library functions. This is useful  for example for
>> applications which talk to specific drivers  and it's not
>> efficient/possible to create system native DLL  for such driver or
>> library. Win32 app. vendor is required only to detect execution under
>> Wine and load proper native library.
>
> Windows apps don't call *nix libraries directly as is, so I'm not sure
> I understand the purpose here. I can see it could potentially be
> useful for porting apps using winelib, but I don't see how it can be
> useful for full win32 apps precompiled for Windows systems.

It is very useful for win32 apps in case you are dealing with hardware
or some specific stuff. I am not talking about using this to fix wine
bugs (i.e. creating a broken app).

Think about application that is used for some industrial control, uses
some USB device with vendor-specific driver (no hid, CDC, mass
storage, etc). If you want to get it working on Linux, you have to
either create complicated wrapper for your Windows drivers (which is
in many cases impossible, btw) or you can use native linux driver,
libusb, etc. Another good example is automotive diagnostics. And
another example is FTDI FTD2xx drivers (although they have tried to
maintain compatibility between Win/Linux/Mac versions, you have to use
different routines on each system).

All this is what WINEGATE.DLL sovles with minimum possible effort. You
simply create class "CWin32Driver" "CLinuxWineDriver" and you're done.


>> I agree that in most cases it's better to fix Wine than applications,
>> but there are real world problems that cannot be efficiently solved
>> outside the application. One good example is when Win32 app has to
>> talk to custom hardware. In many cases there are native Linux drivers
>> that have different API/etc and it is very very difficult to create
>> wrapper library between Windows-style and Linux/Unix-style drivers. In
>> such cases it's much easier to modify source code of Windows app to
>> use either Linux or Windows drivers/DLLs/etc.
>
> Why not use winelib for these cases if *nix support is important
> enough to modify the source so it works nicer in Wine?

Because sometimes you don't get enough customers to get paid for
native Linux version and it's quite complicated to port even mid-sized
projects using winelib. For example try to compile MFC ...

Martin