[Wine] question about WINEPREFIX

[Dan Kegel]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Phobos <wineforum-user at winehq.org> wrote:
>  how does the concept of "bottles" compares/differs with ... Thinstall ...
>  and http://portableapps.com ?

Each bottle, or WINEPREFIX, is just a virtual C: drive, a windows
registry, and a
set of drive letter mappings.   In theory one could move a WINEPREFIX
around; in practice, the unix location leaks through into .lnk files
(that's bug http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11797 ).

Thinstall is that plus the machinery to make it easy to use
one of those on any Windows system, all bundled up in a .exe.
I'm not really sure about portableapps, haven't looked at those.

But the main difference is that nobody has put the effort into
making WINEPREFIXes portable between systems.  Oh, wait,
I think some Chinese company has done that, and made
a thinstall-like thing for Linux that rolls up Wine plus a WINEPREFIX
into a single linux executable.  Lessee... nope, I can't recall what
they're called.  I think they were mentioned on wine-devel
as a possible wine license violator a few years ago.
(Not specops, not unified kernel, can't recall...)
- Dan