Request for discussion: Using PE libraries for Wine dependencies

[Zebediah Figura]

On 4/13/20 11:07 AM, Gabriel Ivăncescu wrote:
> 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).

I don't think this should be done. There's nothing Wine-specific about
mingw libraries. Distributions I'm familiar with install them in paths
like "/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/lib/libwhatever.so".

> 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.

Ideally this wouldn't be necessary, because Unix libraries tend to be
good at backwards compatibility, but if it is, I think it'd be
potentially easier just to adjust this from the Wine side; probably it'd
be as simple as changing the build order to "native,builtin" and
supplying your own library somewhere in the path.

> 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.
> 

I think we're certainly going to have to package and distribute mingw
libraries ourselves, at least for some distributions. But that doesn't
mean we should make them Wine-specific.