Recommending fixes (was: mfc42: Stub implementation with the message where to get it from)

[Paul Chitescu]

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 15:25:56 Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Vitaliy Margolen <wine-patches at kievinfo.com> writes:
> > This is more of the testing waters type of patch. If this approach is
> > fine then we can do the same for all other dlls that are shipped with
> > Windows but not really a part of an O/S.
>
> I don't think you can put up a message box on attach, that could
> potentially become very annoying since it will trigger also for version
> checks etc.  That sort of thing should be done at the loader level.

What about a generic mechanism that would trigger a separate program to 
recommend - and possibly install - missing components? That program doesn't 
even need to be a win32 program.

My current idea is to somehow catch the fixme and err messages and pipe a copy 
of them to a filter that will identify "interesting" strings and build a list 
of fix candidates. Then it can start something like 
winetricks --prompt="Recommended installs to fix your problem" mfc42 vb6run

This way we may detect other problems that may have a known solution like 
missing DLLs, unimplemented OLE interfaces, assemblies with wrong version.