Request for discussion: Using PE libraries for Wine dependencies

[Gabriel Ivăncescu]

On 13/04/2020 18:02, Zebediah Figura wrote:
> On 4/13/20 3:01 AM, Rémi Bernon wrote:
>>
>> Linux distributions already have quite a hard time factoring the 
>> dependencies and keeping all the Linux software working together 
>> nicely, and I think that doing the same for Windows software that was 
>> never written with such a setup in the first place -every application 
>> ships its with own dependencies isolated from the others- may be more 
>> painful than expected.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand: we wouldn't be managing dependencies for 
> Windows software any more than we already are; we'd only be managing 
> dependencies for Wine itself.l
> 
>>
>> Cheers,
> 
> 

FWIW, if this approach is chosen, I think they should first go (or be 
read in) somewhere in wine's directory, like other libs (or how Proton 
bundles its libs in <wine_dir>/lib{,64} for example) and the system-wide 
paths after that if those aren't found (or maybe not at all, because 
most distros don't even ship with mingw libraries... and I hate being 
reliant on this fact).

This is so you can use specific wine versions with specific libraries if 
you wish to do so, instead of a single system-wide choice for all 
versions. It also makes them potentially neatly stored in one place.

This is more important since you won't be able to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH or 
LD_PRELOAD either to "hack" the load order for debugging or any other 
reason.

Also, you'll be able to use Wine with older distros or otherwise more 
obscure ones that don't package them. Just drop it and run from its 
directory.