building plugins on Win32 ?

[Alejandro T. Singer]

PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST, I'M ON IT BY MISTAKE
THANKS
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gildas Bazin" <gbazin at netcourrier.com>
To: <vlc-devel at videolan.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2001 1:49 PM
Subject: building plugins on Win32 ?


> Hi
>
> I wanted to add the possibility to build dll plugins for the VLC on Win32,
> but I realized the Win32 DLL implementation lacks a really important
> feature: back-linking.
> What I mean by back-linking is when the DLL tries to access symbols
defined
> in the main program (the one which is calling the DLL).
>
> So, when I try to build dll plugins the compiler tells me that there are
> undefined symbols like:
>
> vout_sdl.o(.text+0x1c4):vout_sdl.c: undefined reference to
> `main_GetIntVariable'
> vout_sdl.o(.text+0x206):vout_sdl.c: undefined reference to `intf_ErrMsg'
> vout_sdl.o(.text+0x225):vout_sdl.c: undefined reference to `p_main'
> vout_sdl.o(.text+0x234):vout_sdl.c: undefined reference to
`intf_AssignKey'
> ..
>
> I can see only two solutions to this problem:
> - Put the functions required by the plugins in another DLL (in that case
we
> can do the linking)
> - Or do the run-time linking by hand, which means we would pass to the DLL
> plugin (at run-time) a structure that contains the pointers to all the
> necessary functions
>
> I don't really like either of these solutions, mainly because it would
> require a lot of modifications to the VLC code (even though some
> functionnalities like the debug functions could be done as plugins).
>
> I guess we can live with only builtin plugins, but dll plugins would be so
> nice...
>
> Does anybody have ideas or comments ?
> Would the VLC team be ready to modify the plugins architecture just to
> satisfy the needs of the Win32 port ? (I guess I already know the answer
> ;-)
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Gildas
>
>