wine.conf

[Ian Collier]

Here is another stupid question, sure to make myself unpopular...

Almost all the available documentation, including the manual pages and
the README file which comes with 20010418, and at least two help files
referenced off the winehq web site, says that wine reads a configuration
file from /etc/wine.conf [or /usr/local/etc/wine.conf].  The src.rpm
from which I installed 20010418 even installs a sample config file in
/etc/wine.conf.

As I'm sure you know, the above isn't the case.  Wine won't even attempt
to read it, and I am forced to "ln -s /etc/wine.conf ~/.wine/config",
which is silly.  There is even one article way back in this newsgroup
claiming that /etc/wine.conf is obsolete and deprecated, but not
actually giving a reason for this.

I saw one reference from which I inferred that you could put something
in ~/.wine/config to make wine read a specific configuration file, but
this may have been a misreading of the README file because I can't find
that reference any more.

The only hint I can find is at section 4.1.3 of
http://www.winehq.org/Docs/wine-user/configuring.shtml#AEN891
where it states the usual /usr/local/etc/wine.conf and then says

> NOTE: this file is currently unused as a new global configuration
> mechanism is not in place at this time

So.  Why in the name of sanity is there no global configuration
mechanism?  Isn't /etc where all Linux programs are meant to put
their configuration files?
-- 
---- Ian Collier : imc at comlab.ox.ac.uk : WWW page below
------ http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ian.collier/imc.shtml