On 4/18/06, Mike Hearn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The GIMP now has the ability to use Photoshop plugins using Wine. And so on.
As you point out later, Photoshop's plugins are out of process (http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/pspi.html) so that's not a good example of the problem you're trying so solve. (They make the mistake of shipping a winelib executable, but that's a minor sin.) > It'd be nice if there was a simple API programs could use to do this, for > instance, wine_dlopen("whatever.dll"), wine_adopt_thread() and so on to > make re-use of Win32 components and COM objects easy. > > This has been discussed before and Alexandre wasn't sure it was worth it > as it'd be a significant extension to the (stable??) Wine APIs I still think it's an excellent idea, albeit difficult. > so IMHO > this one shouldn't be judged on whether it gets checked in or not but > rather whether it works and how easy it is to use. I wouldn't put it that way. I'd continue "and if it clearly makes the world a happy place, Alexandre will naturally change his mind". > Thoughts? I know roughly what needs to be done so I could mentor this one, > but students be warned - it requires _excellent_ understanding of > operating system design and things like threading. There's a reason such a > thing doesn't already exist, and it's because it's hard. On the flip side > it's not a massive amount of code IMHO so the work would mostly involve > learning, debugging, etc rather than simply being a hard typing slog. Yep, it would take a special student for this one. > Such a thing has many uses: > > * Hosting ActiveX controls inside a native Firefox Now that's an evil use :-) On the whole, I hope this happens. It would be an interesting experiment. - Dan
