Versions & mass-appeal

[Greg Turner]

On Wednesday 30 October 2002 12:57 am, Ender wrote:
>  - No users, because of two things:
>      - Many apps do not work without Desktop enabled. This is far
> worse than it sounds, because most newbies try managed non-desktop
> first. People think WINE should be able to do seemless intergration.
> Then when an application hangs, they think it's incompatible and give
> up. However in many cases the Application will work fine in Desktop
> mode. BAD, these apps should either be made to work... or non-desktop
> mode should be removed!

wierd, I basically never have theese problems, even in cases where the 
AppDB says it's an issue... what apps need this right now?

>      - Getting the right set of dlloverrides and registry entries
> correct for a large portion of software is irritating.

yes.  perhaps we should include a much larger default config with usable 
defaults for several popular programs (or two config files, one for 
shared installs, one for wine-only installs)?  I'd be happy to 
contribute my config file, for one, which runs quite a bit of junk.

> Most of this
> comes down to the lack of WINE being able to dynamically run RunOnce
> and wininit.ini entries. Doing this manually is far beyond your
> average user who just wants to install a reasonably complex program.
> Something like Crossover's reboot.so is needed.

this is a relatively simple task, isn't it?  wininit.ini is especially 
easy; RunOnce is a little trickier, because some RunOnce stuff should 
probably be censored.  Another issue I see is the appearance of certain 
8.3 filenames in the registry and the filesystem when running certain 
installers; this is kind of tricky to fix programmatically, but it 
could be done as part of a reboot.so-type program, I guess.  Another 
(simpler) option would be to make a log of such problems during 
registry and filesystem operations, and notify the user to process the 
log during "reboot."

Also, during "reboots" that I've done using "explorer.exe", I notice 
some regsvr32's tend to fail; usually, they can be fixed using various 
dll overrides to regsvr32; a registry of special per-dll-to-register 
regsvr dll overrides, and a wrapper to invoke regsvr32 with the 
appropriate overrides from this registry, could go a long way towards 
eliminating this.  Again, this will only help those doing mixed 
installations.

-- 
gmt

"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people"
 --President Bill Clinton, MTV interview, 1993