GSoC

[Scott Ritchie]

Christopher Harvey wrote:
> I've had a few ideas that I thought of on my own, but now I'm starting 
> to see they perhaps aren't as useful as the ideas thought of by current 
> developers, but I'll float it out there one last time. I thought it 
> would be cool to create a wine GUI overlay for games, exactly like 
> nvPerfHUD. The thing about doing it in wine that makes it better than 
> nvPerHUD is the fact the to use nvPerfHUD the apps have to give 
> permission for nvPerHUD to run on them. A wine version would actually be 
> able to force every single 3d app, opengl or directX to output nvPerfHUD 
> like output. Anyway, just a thought. Would I be able to apply for both 
> of these projects and pick one last minute?
> Thanks,
> Chris.
> 

After talking about the concept a bit at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, I
really don't like the idea of a "Wine GUI" just for running Wine
applications.  From the user's persepctive, installers for Wine
applications shouldn't be substantially different from any old Linux
installer - they just click on them, it adds something to their
applications menu, and from then on they can run it from there.

Most of the futzing with applications, like messing around with native
dlls in winecfg, shouldn't have to be done at all.  The same goes with
editing the registry.

Configuration we'll never be able to eliminate completely, like
selecting the windows version, should ultimately be done through an
intuitive place and not some central "Wine configuration" program.  For
instance, I should be able to right click a Windows application, select
properties, and then change the Windows version from there.

So, yes, I agree.  Winecfg is ugly and inadequate for the kind of
configuration our users are doing now.  But before we put too much
effort into sprucing up Winecfg, let's instead talk about how feasible
it is to make it unneeded in the first place.


Thanks,
Scott Ritchie