RFC: Sharing a wineprefix

[Avery Pennarun]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Paul Chitescu <paulc at voip.null.ro> wrote:
> Required changes I've identified so far:
>        - The R/W lock to the prefix
>        - wineserver -k as admin should terminate all users' instances
>        - wineserver needs to be able to load Registry hives R/O
>        - wineboot needs to be able to create just the user's profile and ignore
> pending renames for restricted users
>        - Report to application the detected type of user: Administrator / Restricted
>        - Some winecfg settings need to be migrated from HKCU to HKLM so the admin
> can enforce sane values or provide proper defaults or because they are
> logically per prefix
>        - The user Registry hive and the temporary directory for the restricted users
> need to be stored in their profile directory

In my particular case, what I would like is in some ways actually simpler:

- Define WINEPREFIX and WINEUSERPREFIX.

- For all file accesses:
 - If accessing read-only: try reading from WINEUSERPREFIX; if it's
not there, use WINEPREFIX instead.
 - If accessing read-write: try reading from WINEUSERPREFIX; if it's
not there, copy from WINEPREFIX instead.

If the admin updates WINEPREFIX, then I can just wipe out my personal
WINEUSERPREFIX to see his changes.

You might want to be configurable to have certain paths (the HKLM
registry and Program Files folders, among others) not ever use the
WINEUSERPREFIX, but I don't need that.

I think this feature would be really handy for supporting shared
installations.  One big advantage of this method over others is that
it should work even if multiple users are doing destructive things to
the same files; they won't see each others' changes.  This makes it
great for test environments (which is one of the things I'd definitely
use it for).

Have fun,

Avery