Canonical and wine

Reece Dunn msclrhd at googlemail.com
Thu Dec 11 13:13:52 CST 2008


2008/12/11 Steven Edwards <sedwards at bordeauxgroup.com>:
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Zachary Goldberg <zgold at bluesata.com> wrote:
>> I believe it has been proposed before to have .debs for things like
>> Adobe Photoshop which first install Wine (or create a new prefix etc.)
>> and then ask for the Photoshop CD; sort of like application specific
>> bundlings of Wine.
>
> This has been the long term plan we've had with Bordeaux. We
> ultimately want to give the user the ablity to just do something along
> the lines of
>
> sudo apt-get install photoshopcs
>
> ...
>
> 2. Templates
> The ultimate goal is of course that it will just install out of the
> box with no dependencies, fonts or wine dlloverride tricks. This is of
> course not possible in every case and so we need to take this in to
> account.

The PlayOnLinux (http://www.playonlinux.com) team have install scripts
for various applications. I don't know how good these are or how
reliable they are.

> 4. Most of the backend to support this is already in place. Now that
> my IE6 changes are in winetricks, I could TODAY create a ie6.deb
> package. Thanks to other users that have made winetricks steps in the
> appdb we could do this for a host of other packages.

It would be useful to have winetricks distributed in a deb/rpm
package, so that you could install it easily to have it
updated/managed by the package manager. This would provide the core
support for installing applications run on wine via deb/rpm packages
(that would depend on winetricks and wine).

Each application would then use winetricks (and any support scripts
that it provides, similar to what PlayOnLinux does), and support an
install.sh and uninstall.sh script. These scripts can then be run via
the pre/post install/uninstall hooks in the deb/rpm packages to do the
installation.

For the install.sh and uninstall.sh scripts, it could be useful to
provide a mechanism in AppDB to create and modify these so that the
maintainers/users of the application could create these scripts. There
would need to be a way to aggregate the scripts and to version control
them.

Also, to simplify package creation we could have a configuration file
that then generates the deb or rpm data and builds the corresponding
package output using the package manager tools. This information (and
what version of wine the app works well on) could even be extracted
from AppDB itself and thus remove the need to have a wine-specific
package configuration format.

- Reece



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