WINEGATE.DLL: Wine gateway to native Unix libraries

[Martin Hinner]

Ben,

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/14 Martin Hinner <martin at hinner.info>:
> Wine is (or has been) working on a driver system to handle native
> Windows USB device drivers via libusb, for things like printers and
> scanners where there are no Linux-native drivers. This is a better
> solution.

Yes, but it is only for some devices. I will give you again one
example I was mentioning: FTD2XX.DLL driver from FTDI. They have
versions for many systems, but these behave a little bit different
way. Tell me how would you solve this problem. Write a complicated
libftd2xx.dll.so wrapper to maintain compatibility ? For how many
applications would it work? There are thousands of similar problems
between Win32-Linux world. Do you think that ISVs will find budget for
this to support Linux or just not do it?

> All this is what WINEGATE.DLL sovles with minimum possible effort. You
>> simply create class "CWin32Driver" "CLinuxWineDriver" and you're done.
>
> Only when a suitable native Linux library already exists, correct?
> There aren't many cases of this, from what I understand.

I think it's more cases than you think. I can give a lot of examples,
but that would be "spamming" of this mailing-list.

Just one more thing, I tried one of our applications using HID-usb
device. Does not work under Wine. I have no idea why, it's probably
possible to fix the problem (in wine), but this clearly shows that
world is not always ideal.

>>> 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 ...
>
> Given that for your system to work there has to be a Linux-native
> library for winegate to hook into, the effort involved in porting to
> Linux via winelib would likely be equal.

I disagree...

I am not pushing on WINEGATE.DLL inclusion in Wine package. If it's
not included, we'll include it in our installers and problem is
solved. But I think other developers need such library to make their
apps. working under Wine and it's much better to have one "standard"
and well documented library than 10 or 20 proprietary solutions. I
understand it is not clean solution, but world is not perfect.

If it's included, I am willing to help with maintenance and write some
documentation.

My feeling is that Linux desperately needs applications that currently
run only on Windows. Companies will not use Linux if they cannot run
their applications on it. It's like binary drivers. They are bad, but
better than nothing. In an ideal world there would be no need for Wine
anyway :-).

Martin