wine.conf

[Ove Kaaven]

On Tue, 8 May 2001, Ian Collier wrote:

> 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.

The rpms are outside the Wine team's jurisdiction (there are no official
Wine rpms), but I suppose those docs ought to be updated.

> 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 claiming that /etc/wine.conf is obsolete and deprecated, but not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 don't know any good reason myself, other than that the format changed,
and Alexandre still hasn't cared enough about multiuser capabilities to
decide on how a global config is supposed to work with the new format, and
thus allow any developer to implement such a scheme. It's possible that
pestering him a bit more about the importance of the global config may be
the only way to get progress here... as soon as he makes up his mind there
are enough developers waiting to get the chance of having the global
config back to implement whatever scheme he finally decides on.
(On the other hand, he has done some AppDefaults stuff for the config file
lately, so maybe he could be working on the global config too...)

> > 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?

Not necessarily... for example, most GNOME apps put their configuration
data under ~/.gnome. In most cases, /etc isn't for configuration, but for
system defaults, and system defaults are only necessary for multiuser
configurations.