winelauncher

[Vitaliy Margolen]

Anssi Hannula wrote:
> Vitaliy Margolen wrote about Debian packaging:
>> It seems there is no end to how far will packagers go to brake Wine by
>> trying to make it better
> [...]
>> Also as default it's using "winelauncher"
>> instead of standard "wine" binary. That makes it that much more
>> complicated to troubleshoot any problems that users might have.
> 
> Could you (or someone else) explain why is it bad to use "winelauncher"?
There are number of reasons:
1. It outputs different information from normal "wine" command. This is
confusing to user as well as person who trying to debug the problem.
2. It's hard-coded to the default WINEPREFIX. More and more users
starting to use other prefixes for testing purposes or just to separate
applications.
3. It's not well maintained.
4. It does not work with wine from source directory or custom "wine"
scripts. I don't have Wine installed but I have custom ~/bin/wine
script. The winelauncher was unable to find nor start wine properly in
this configuration.

And possibly number of other problems that I don't know about.

> We don't currently use it in the Mandriva packaging of wine, but a
> request just got opened asking us to use "winelauncher" instead of "wine":
> http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27638
What bug reporter seems to ask is to add "wine" and possibly "winecfg"
entries to the WM's menu. That is something you can do with provided xpm
icon and pre-made wine.desktop link. That link should also take care of
associating Wine with at least *.exe files. Also it might be because
until few versions back, Wine was able to create menu entries for KDE
users only.

Oh and also looking at winelauncher, it doesn't create the links bug
reporter asks for.

Vitaliy.