Manifest attachment to the older winamp.exe

[SilverBird775]

Hi,

I have the legal question on winamp component optimization.

I've been asked by my users to adapt the plugin to the older Winamp 2.95. I meant to do this by attaching the "newer style" manifest resource section to the winamp.exe so it will load the correct CRT libraries so the newer style third party 5.5+ plugins may load with the older winamp. Everything else will be done via API translation GEN plugin. I just cant get rid of the 'DLL hell' problem without doing a tiny manifest attachment to the original file because nothing external will work. In no way the actual code or any tiny bit of data will be changed.

There is still active winamp 2.95 users so i'm asking for their sake. Is it possible to make such a 'system repack'? To my knowledge the winamp installer is making the 'system repacking' to the third party plugins without asking them, so may the the third party installer make a system optimization for a winamp itself?

I just don't know what to do.

[DrO]

statically compile your dll(s) against the crt. trying to bodge things onto an old winamp.exe is going to cause you isssue.

though i think you're insane for supporting 2.95 especially if you then have to re-create things which are in 5.5+ to do it but that's your time you're wasting.

-daz

[SilverBird775]

They do cause issue indeed. But the translation side will be very limited, enough to run few plugins.
There could be many plugins later and they will keep updating. Making the development forked will cause the download confuse too. I was hoped to take a lesser evil for retrogrades while giving my full attention to 5.X users.

I do certainly will take your response in consideration but still i'm asking for an recommendation, will it be a strong no-no for doing ANYTHING with winamp.exe, the manifest attachment i mean?

[DrO]

you're going about this wrong and attaching manifests to winamp.exe is not the way to go.

if you absolutely must support 9+ year old versions and the issue is the CRT dependencies (as seems to be the case), then statically linking is the only viable manner unless you manually install the required CRT version and then it can be accessed globally without messing with winamp.exe, etc.


really i think it is irresponsible to be actively developing work arounds for legacy versions of Winamp which are known to not work correctly on the OSes that you're targeting your plug-in for (Vista and higher) and are a security risk *shrugs*

-daz

[SilverBird775]

Your response was valuable to me.

Thank you.