Two enhancement requests for winetricks

[Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com]

Hi,

Jan Hoogenraad wrote:
>Each debugging request for wine states that I should remove all winetricks.
AppDB should request something similar: minimal use of winetricks.
>However I have no way to tell, and no way to safely remove them.

IMHO one solution to your problem is to learn to use different .wine prefixes.

Both developers and AppDB users want a repeatable process to make the
app run (or crash).  If you install all your software into a single
.wine hierarchy (like you'd do on MS-Windows), then you cannot tell
anyone what you did to make the app work in Wine.  All you have is "I
started with Wine-0.9.48, upgraded to wine-1.1.6 at some time, now to
wine-1.2rc2, used "winetricks X" and Y, perhaps I used "winetricks
directx" but I can't remember for sure, I installed apps A, B and C
(they may have installed more components) and I edited the registry a
few times.  Given all that, app Z works fine in on my machine."

This is a mess much like a typical MS-Windows installation.
With Wine, you can do better than that.

What people want to hear from you is as follows:
 - Create a fresh .wine prefix with wine-X.Y;
 - Install Indeo Video codecs via "winetricks indeo" because I found out
   that the app expects them but does not install them itself;
 - Install the app from CD;
 - From a DirectX install into a separate .wine-* prefix,
   solely copy d3dx9_36.dll into system32/ (or the app's directory)
 - Change setting Y in winecfg, e.g. native d3dx9_36;
 - App Z works (or crashes like that ...).
That is a minimal instruction set.

I have like a dozen .wine-* directory hierarchies. I never use .wine
itself except for regression testing, such that I can rm -rf ~/.wine
and create a fresh one at any time.

That's why I don't need an uninstaller. rm -rf ~/.wine-xyz or
rm -rf ~/wineapps/... *is* the uninstaller (.wine-xyz/drive_c/Programs/Apps/
symlinks to $HOME/wineapps such that the apps live independently on a particular .wine prefix).

Regards,
	Jörg Höhle