[Wine] Help installing software with multiple cd's

[Plamen Vassilev]

On Monday 06 April 2009 10:22:26 perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> "vitamin" <winehq.org!wineforum-user at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> > perryh wrote:
> > > Ideally, wine would figure out that the application has
> > > requested a disk change
> >
> > They never do. They just tell user to put next CD.
>
> Telling the user to put in the next CD is exactly what I mean by
> "requesting a disk change."
>
> > There is no way for Wine to know about this. The only thing Wine
> > might do is to listen to dbus/HAL for the unmount request from
> > user (when user pushes the button to eject CD).
>
> Or it could notice that the app has put up a modal dialog containing
> text that asks for the next CD.  Yes, that sort of recognition could
> be tricky -- probably no two installers use exactly the same message
> -- which is why I acknowledged that it might amount to a Turing test.
> It is surely possible in principle, but not necessarily practical.
It's not a viable solution at all. There is no way from programming point of 
view to detect CD change request. If you think otherwise - send patches to 
devs.

>
> > perryh wrote:
> > > What *could* be done would be to access removable devices
> > > (at least, CDs and floppies) without having them mounted,
> >
> > Nothing. This is not Wine's job to mount devices.
>
> Not to mount them, but to access them without needing them to be
> mounted.  This would be a much better match to Windows, which has
> no concept of mounting and unmounting removable disks, 
Windows does have a concept of mounting and unmounting disks. It is hidden 
from the user's point of view for Hard drives, CDs and Floppies, but clearly 
seen when using USB flash memory sticks for example, or other media that can 
be disconnected in the middle of read/write operation.

>and it would
> not be difficult to do for floppies and other FAT-formatted disks
CDs are usually not FAT formatted.

> because the functionality is already implemented in mtools.  All
> that's needed is for wine to call mtools to read files instead of
> accessing them via the filesystem.  Of course mtools would need to
> be given the proper device name, which wine can get by reading the
> a:: (or d::, etc.) symlink.
>
> I don't know offhand whether a similar tool already exists for CDs,
> but if not it might be worth writing one since it would solve the
> mount/unmount problem once and for all.
As always - devs will enjoy your patches.


-- 
regards
Plamen Vassilev
Software Engineer & System Administrator

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