Writes to config file on the fly? (Was: Re: GTA3 crash :( -- RedHat 9)

Dustin Navea speeddymon at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 14 16:48:58 CDT 2003


--- Lionel Ulmer <lionel.ulmer at free.fr> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 10:02:55PM +0100, Jason Edmeades wrote:
> > I dont like adding configuration options for things which should be 
> > transparent to the user. I'll have to look into this again in the 
> > future, but in the meantime I might put code to catch the X exception 
> > and cope with it.
> 
> Well, yeah, at least handle the X error gracefully. Or this is where you
> could put something like 'Add the following lines to your config file and
> re-run Wine'. And as you can get easily the application name here, you can
> pretty easily generate a nice pre-formatted config entry.

On those two notes, I spawned an idea ;)  Jason is right, there are things
that should be transparent to the user, and a note in the terminal window
wont always be shown (in the case of the user not launching wine from the
terminal window), why not, when we need an option to be put in the config
file, have wine automagically do just that?  Instead of a note saying this
needs to be added to your config, just have wine do it and then pop up a
message saying wine needs to restart, do it now or do it later?

Before you flame me with transparency is key, it is still transparent to the
user, because windows just pops up with that all the time: Windows needs to
be restarted in order for the changes you have made to take effect. Press OK
to restart now or Cancel to restart later.

Of course there are some problems I can think of (if anyone can think of a
workaround feel free to post it):

1) The whole message box saying wine needs to be restarted, workaround note
in terminal saying it instead..
2) Doing things behind users back is to M$'ish, workaround, put a note in
terminal saying we are doing this (warn())
3) Config options that cause problems with some programs but fix others,
workaround 1 word: appdefaults
4) Config options that dont work (are disabled for whatever reason),
workaround fix them and if that isnt feasible due to Xfree or X11 bugs, note
in the console you need this option but enabling it can cause strange
behavior and side effects, so use it with caution (user has to enable it
themselves)

Anything else I haven't mentioned?  Overhauling wine maybe? (havent looked
into where it would need to be implemented)

Remember this is just an idea, feel free to shoot it down for whatever
reason, but it would sure make things a whole lot easier for users...



=====
--
Dustin Navea

Minor Contributor, http://www.winehq.com
Bugzilla Janitor, http://bugs.winehq.com
Network Admin, irc://irc.blynk.net (down)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com



More information about the wine-devel mailing list