Wine packages, universe maintainence, and myself

[Mike Hearn]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 17:49:01 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> We may want to have an entirely new applications menu for Wine.  I
> envision having Wine installed and then having it create a new folder
> Applications->Wine, which will contain the Winecfg program labeled
> "Configure Wine" as well as a near empty start menu with Wine's shipped
> winelib Notepad program.  When other windows programs get installed,
> they can be put in the Wine start menu there.

FWIW the GNOME HIG recommends stating what something is, rather than it's
name. 

This makes sense because to a new Linux user the name "Wine" is
meaningless, the fact that it's a cute abbreviation for Windows Emulator
or "Wine is not an emulator" (depending on whether you read Slashdot)
isn't obvious at all.

So I think it'd make more sense to put a launcher called "Configure
Windows Emulation" in the System tools/System settings menu, rather than
give it a dedicated menu. We should do this in the upstream sources rather
than have it be an Ubuntu specific patch.

On menu integration: this is hard. Really hard. You do not want to know
about the contortions we go through in Crossover to make it work. It's
simpler for WineHQ because we can tell anybody not using bleeding-edge
desktops that they lose, but even so I'd suggest starting by fixing the
current menu code to write out .desktop files with a special category
"Win32", and dumping them in ~/.local/share/applications or
wherever they're supposed to go. 

That way you'd get all the Windows start menu items in one submenu. You
lose the tree structure but that's not as big a deal as you may think,
because a nearly empty start menu looks a bit weird and most of the time I
guess Wine users will have one or two apps installed.

You may need to wait for Hoary for this to work, as the current stable
release of GNOME doesn't understand XDG menus which is the spec we must
target. The unstable/development GNOME in Hoary does understand it.

Oh, remember to make the .desktop files use the start.exe program ... some
apps need that and it's an easy fix!

Final thing, we need a nice icon for win32 EXE files. I filed a bug
against gnome-icon-theme (really we want it in hicolor so non-GNOME users
get it too) but Jimmac is a busy busy man ...

thanks -mike