[Wine] Wine/Interix -- The pros and cons.

[Segin]

I was thinking about running Wine on Interix (the POSIX layer of 
Microsoft's Services for Unix). There are a few apparent unknows:

Would Wine load the .dll.so's? Since Interix uses PE for it's native 
format (running on Windows, duh), Would Wine load the .dll.so's? Would 
it reject them being in PE format and having the 'POSIX Layer' attribute 
set, or could we hack on a patch to detect if Wine itself is running in 
said layer, and load them if it is? Would that even *work*? And how 
about detecting Winelib applications? It might get detected as a regular 
Windows app, and ... uh-oh... (let's just say it isn't pretty)

There are several obvious pros: You can test Wine almost fully under 
Windows without mingling with Windows's native componets. This would 
allow for better and faster compatability tests. We could also see what 
"unknowns" exist in Interix -- Althought not nessessrarly useful to Wine 
developers itself, it could mean a whole new generation of applications 
which are half-Unix, half-Windows, if the right holes are found.

I am sure this will spark a LOT of debate.