Winetools -> wine doors

[Karl Lattimer]

I read your story about winetools a couple weeks ago around the same
time that I tried using winetools on FC5 test 3, it didn't go well with
winetools and I was looking for another solution and couldn't find one
that fitted well with my criteria.

I started thinking of packages like RPMs and started breaking down a
wine application installation into what we would need to run it directly
from the application menu.

What I came up with this is, its pretty raw right now, its simply a
small self contained package for managing the install process of a wine
application, soon I'm going to start work on creating a package
repository and the package browser but would really like to use the
appdb for supplementary information, i.e. screenshots version
compatibility etc... 

http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?cat=6

I have also considered having a way of making apps install gobally on a
machine so any and every user has access to them, and considered using
inotify to watch events and provide a way of handling this.

This is still in the beginning stages and I would be grateful for any
input you may have. I was very interested in what was published here,

http://www.winehq.org/?issue=308#Winetools..%20part%20II

I've looked through the winetools code and it is a clusterf*ck of
nonsense. It appears to be in the final stages of code rot, however
there are some useful little bits in there which I have been
cannibalising when necessary into my own application. The beauty of this
is that it is only an application shell, in theory the appdb could be
the central configuration repository containing all the information to
make an app work. Available apps can be browsed, downloaded if possible
or installed from a cd drive with minimal fuss.

I have one other who has joined in the project, his name is Alex Doukas
and I believe he has also recently joined wine-devel.

Right now we're at the stage of building up some script archives and
starting to put together application packs for the most important stuff,
I will be working on the downloaders/xml parsers within the next couple
of weeks and hopefully we should soon have a working application where
the community keeps it up to date.

To prevent duplication of work I would suggest that suggestions to my
project will be accepted, I hope to provide some public space for bug
tracking etc... in the next couple of weeks and even public SVN. I
currently have this configured and running but unfortunately do not have
a great deal of bandwidth. The more people who join in the better,
python programmers especially welcome, any scripts should eventually be
posted to the bugzilla. Once the application db and my application fit
together nicely we could have users publishing scripts in the appdb.