How to include a part of Wine that can only be compiled on Windows (Gecko)

[Scott Ritchie]

Wine uses the Gecko rendering engine for functionality in its fake
internet explorer, which is needed by a lot of applications.  Wine can't
just use the system Gecko that Firefox does, however - it needs to use
the Windows version of Gecko.

This presents a problem, since windows Gecko can't compile on Linux and
Wine can't bundle it upstream.

Currently, Wine gets the Gecko engine the first time it needs to be used
by downloading it over the internet.  This has all sorts of problems;
sometimes the download fails, sometimes the user doesn't have internet,
different users have to download it multiple times since it isn't
system-wide, and the user gets burden with all this confusion.


Wine does, however, support simply using a local copy of the gecko
engine rather than downloading it.  All we have to do is put it in a
specific place on the filesystem.

Ideally, Windows Gecko would be buildable under the tools we already
have in Ubuntu (Mingw), then we could make a wine-gecko package fairly
easily that just put gecko in its place.  Unfortunately, that's not the
case today: the Gecko that Wine needs has to be built with Visual Studio.


So, what's the best way to do this?  Put the file that Wine downloads
anyway into a wine-gecko package, and put that on the local filesystem?
 What do we do about LGPL compliance and providing source code?

I've opened a bug to track integration:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/191132

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie