wine autorun utility

[Chris]

On Thursday 29 June 2006 07:49, you wrote:
> what is the gain of autorun, while i dont have wine running? would not
> the common user expect, once she knows, that wine support autorun.inf,
> that she can insert a cd and away it goes? while the explorer.exe is
> not running permanently - e.g. via xinitrc - then i still would have to
> deal with starting my setup.exe by hand. i have my doubts, that wine is
> the correct place to implement this - but something like hotplugd or
> whatevernowadaysdoesthetrickwithcdroms should handle this?

One could think of Wine as a service, and start it with X if they wanted, so 
they could then run Windows programs whenever they wanted with potentially 
faster startup times, and with Windows "features" like autorun, and with a 
persistant Windows state (eg. instead of being shut down when all Windows 
programs close, it would stay around until Wine itself is explicitly 
stopped). Or, like me currently, they could run a Windows desktop/taskbar 
replacement in a Wine virtual desktop with managed windows off on a seperate 
X desktop and pretend to have Windows running along side X.

I'd think if Wine were trying to "emulate" Windows as much as possible, it'd 
be backwards to not have autorun capabilities. As I said before, autorun.inf 
needs to be parsed anyway since it can define an icon to use for the drive, 
so if you're going to automatically parse it to load an icon, why not also 
ask (one time only) if the user wants to turn autorun on or off to run the 
defined program?