[DOCS, POLICY] Documenting stuff that doesn't work right?

[Holly Bostick]

Hey,

So I just blew away my previous install of Wine and reinstalled from
yesterday's CVS, and went to install a program, so I could take notes on
the most current user experience for the docs. I immediately realized
that I hadn't run winecfg to set my drives, so I went to do that-- and
that's where I ran into this problem.

I was installing Icewind Dale, and like all games and Wine-installed
programs, I meant to install to the partition I have set aside for that
purpose, which is mounted to /usr/local/games, with a symlink in my home
directory. So naturally I usually set this partition to be a Wine drive,
and I prefer to use d: as the browse dialog naturally defaults to the c:
drive and it's faster to change if I only have to change to the next drive.

When I went to the 'Drives' tab in winecfg, I had

c: (of course)
e: (tmp)
f: (my home directory)
z: (/)

You will notice that no removeable media device appears.

So I go to add a drive, which is automatically called D: , as you would
expect, and I set it to point to /usr/local/games, and I also add G: and
set it to point to /media/cdrecorder. Hit apply and all appears well (no
errors or anything of that sort). Run the IWD install again and get to the
installation location section, and G appears in the browser, but D does
not. Cancel and back to winecfg to try again. After several attempts, I
finally opened up a file manager and went to ~/.wine/dosdevices and
looked at what was there.

To my surprise, there was already a link to d:, which was set to /cdrom
(which is an invalid location for me anyway since I use hal, which puts
stuff in /media). Since I had already set the correct mount point of my
DVD drive to the g: link, I just changed d: to my preferred location of
/usr/local/games, and was able to complete the install to the d:\iwd
directory as I had planned.

So the problem is that an automatically created (but wrongly targeted,
in these days of hal/dbus) link is created to the cdrom device does not
appear in the Winecfg drive list (unless you do autodetect, which may
well add additional, unwanted drives to the list that the user would
have to remove), making a drive letter that 'seems' to be available in
fact unavailable for use (the reason that I couldn't set
/usr/local/games to d was because d already existed and couldn't
apparently be changed in its invisibility), and also causing the user to
think that no drive letter is set for the CD/DVD device, so that they
create an unnecessary second link.

Obviously I know how to get around this, having just done so, but is
this appropriate to document? Or is it likely to be fixed before the
updated docs go 'live'? I only ask because I can't think of a way to
write this up atm without explicitly exposing a flaw in Wine, and Wine
doesn't really deserve that-- even winecfg doesn't deserve that, being
much improved from even last month's release (which improvement is
obvious, even though I've only done this single operation). I mean, I'll
take notes on everything, but this looks like a policy question to me.

Holly