Request for discussion: Using PE libraries for Wine dependencies

[Esme (they/them)]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 6:27 PM Zebediah Figura <z.figura12 at gmail.com> wrote:
> (2) not prompting for every add-on (personally I feel that two is
> already too many),

Now that you mention it, I can't think of any reason we couldn't
combine the prompts for the addons we have. We just need someone to do
the work. The hard part is giving appwiz.cpl the ability to test for
all addons including in shared locations, and chaining the steps
together.

> I think some sort of manifest hack would be appropriate here, that ntdll
> would check when loading a builtin DLL. Presumably we don't even want
> the libraries to be copied into the prefix, but rather we want to make
> sure we load them always from /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/* (or whatever
> the path is for any given distribution).

Maybe. The dependencies of those dependencies would also have to be
loaded from system paths (builtin,distro,native search order?). We'd
need the ability to use a list of paths for people who supply their
own versions of the PE libraries, outside the paths controlled by the
distribution. I'm not sure if we need to be concerned about how
Windows programs will respond to seeing library dependencies resolved
in a way that doesn't happen on Windows.

I still think an archive of PE dependencies has merit with this
solution. You'd just have to extract it to /usr/local/, I guess.