Request for discussion: Using PE libraries for Wine dependencies

[Zebediah Figura]

On 4/12/20 8:56 PM, Esme (they/them) wrote:
>> I guess it's not obvious to me there's a difference between "builtin"
>> and "distro" (though we'd presumably not go putting the Wine builtin
>> flag in mingw libraries). But yeah, I guess we'd want to vary load order
>> depending on whether the library is a dependency of a PE builtin or not,
>> in some way.
> 
> I was thinking about the possibility of a distro shipping a dll that's
> also a Wine builtin. But, we could probably resolve that case by
> saying "builtin" searches for wine builtins before distro libraries.
> 
> I guess we'd want the load order to be something like:
>   * If explicitly set in registry or environment, use that.
>   * If Wine builtin, use preattach.
>   * If dependency of Wine builtin that exists in distro search path,
> builtin,native.
>   * If dependency of a dll in distro search path (but not a Wine
> builtin), builtin,native.
>   * Otherwise, native,builtin or maybe even native only (should Wine
> ever use a distro library to resolve dependencies of the
> application?).
> 

This last one is a good question. Would we necessarily expect an 
application-provided PE library to differ from a distro mingw library? 
(Maybe because of a lack of backwards compatibility?) To a degree it 
feels much like preferring builtin d3dx9 when the application provides 
its own.

It also kind of ties into bugs like 14980, 20777, 25373, 43472, 45551, 
47053, 47120, 48275 where preferring builtin DLLs break applications. I 
recall that always preferring native breaks other applications, though I 
don't know any concrete examples... but since I have yet to hear a 
solution to this problem, I have to wonder if it would be better in 
general to use native,builtin for all direct dependencies of native DLLs.

(Presumably we'd want native,builtin rather than native only in any 
case. The number of cases where applications import DLLs but don't ship 
them is pretty small, in my experience? Though that doesn't include 
dynamically loading...)