I'm not convinced direct linking will work better on Mac OS X, unless
you ship libpng and libjpeg with Wine.
And libgnutls (plus prereqs libgpg-error & libgcrypt). And libgphoto2,
libexif, libtiff, libgsm, libjbig... - there's a laundry list of
libraries that are required for a full-featured Wine install, and
prereqs of prereqs, prereqs of THOSE. You get the point. Static
libraries on Mac OS X/Darwin also misbehave in odd ways that you
simply don't see with dylibs as well.
I package all of these up with osxwinebuilder, building shared libs
from source, and it's a bit tricky. Things fail in unforeseen ways if
a user's modified their environment. I had an issue this morning where
libghoto2 was failing for version 2.4.9+, but working for anything
older. Turns out that GD had been installed into /usr from source on
Leopard, the user upgraded to Snow Leopard (which broke a few of GD's
reqs), and libgphoto2 2.4.9+ now checks for GD, which it found,
mysteriously breaking the compile. Had GD been compiled statically, it
may have worked - or not. But that's not something I (or Wine) check
for, just something I didn't consider until today when a prereq broke.
Wine really wants to map and use share libraries like they're supposed
to be used: dynamically, when a module needs them. Pain in getting to
that point on Macs is one reason there's not a binary Wine package
available; licensing and binary distribution questions/methods is
another. Static libraries may be a quick workaround, but ultimately
full shared library coverage for all prereqs on all supported
platforms is the way to go.
If you want a bad example, take a look at GSM. configure simply won't
work with/find a static libgsm on OS X, but a manually-built dylib
works just fine from what I can glean. The fact that the distributor
(s) don't include an easy method for building shared GSM libs on OS X
made this a little tricky to workaround IMO. But it's doable.
Kind of ranting. Let me know if clarification is needed on any point.
Standard Wine on OS X may not work in a Mac user-friendly way, but it
works very well if you just forego a GUI, have good prereq coverage
and use it from the terminal. That's good enough for me! -r
