Re: Wine MinGW system libraries

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 06:13:32PM +0200, Ondrej Mosnacek wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2021 at 5:45 PM Zebediah Figura  wrote:
> > On 9/7/21 2:12 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > > On Mon, Sep 06, 2021 at 05:59:41PM -0500, Zebediah Figura wrote:
> > > > Thanks everyone for their input.
> > > >
> > > > There seems to be a consensus that Fedora would prefer that we use
> > > > their MinGW dynamic libraries. However, this leaves a couple of
> > > > questions:
> > > > As I described in [1], we *may* be able to hack things in the Wine
> > > >
> > > > loader such that we can use unmodified dynamic libraries. However,
> > > > it's not fully clear yet that it's feasible. If it turns out to be
> > > > infeasible, what preferences does Fedora have? (Renamed dynamic
> > > > libraries shipped separately, shipped as part of Wine, static
> > > > libraries, etc...)
> > >
> > > Adding -static subpackages is the easiest option from our point of
> > > view.  As I mentioned in the previous email this would mean adjusting
> > > an existing spec such as:
> > > https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mingw-gnutls/blob/rawhide/f/mingw-gnutls....
> > > so that it builds the static library.  It's a simple and obvious
> > > change.
> > >
> > > But can Wine use the static library built this way unmodified?
> > > And are there any other implications versus using a DLL?
> >
> > I believe we should be able to use unmodified static libraries, yes.
> >
> > There are the usual implications—more space on disk and in memory; in
> > Wine's case it doesn't really matter a lot, but we do still have cases
> > of multiple DLLs that use the same library. It may be possible to use
> > helper DLLs to avoid that in most cases.
> >
> > And, of course, I hate developing with static libraries :-(
>
> Could you perhaps just build a new dynamic library (with the adjusted
> name) by linking an empty/dummy object with the Fedora-provided static
> library? (Not sure if that's possible, but it's what came to my mind
> when reading this thread.)

I doubt this is going to be possible.  Windows PE DLLs have some
complicated machinery for declaring exported symbols.  Plus (like ELF)
I imagine the compiler needs to generate quite different code for
static vs dynamic.

Rich.