GSOC proposal - control panel

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Owen,

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Owen Rudge <owen at owenrudge.net> wrote:
<snip>

>  interested in working on some other applets, such as an Add/Remove Programs
>  applet, or a Multimedia applet. Obviously, there wouldn't necessarily be
>  time to implement all of these, so my intention would be to get the main
>  control panel and basic Wine control panel applets from winecfg working well
>  first, and then look at other applets that could be implemented.
>
>  I've developed applications and, indeed, Control Panel applets for Windows
>  for many years now (I started programming using the Windows API when I was
>  12!), so I feel confident that this is a task I would be able to handle. I
>  believe that a good configuration interface for Wine that supports
>  third-party control panels is something that would be very useful for
>  end-users.
>
>  If anyone has any comments or suggestions regarding my proposal, I'd very
>  much appreciate any feedback.

I don't really know if we want to just focus on applets or if we
should not aim for having this project provide better integration with
the native desktop. As far as I understand there is some
infrastructure work that will need to be done in shell32 as I don't
think we fully implement the entire Control Panel shellname space. I
expect implementing this properly will take a good bit of time. What
would be cool would be if we fully supported the namespace so that
when you called control.exe it loaded the control panel window and
that could be embedded in a GTK or QT window for use by native
applications. There was a patch floating around on wine-patches a few
months back to allow for embedding a Win32 Wine window inside of an
existing X window that should do the trick.

As far as migration of the stuff in winecfg and other programs go, I
think starting with the Add/Remove applet is a good. I don't think it
would be too hard to take all of the current logic in
wine/programs/uninstall and wrap it in a proper applet. We want to
make sure that we don't introduce any sort of regression when we make
the switch over so reusing that code would be a good place to start.

So to recap, (this just goes for for me) I think the project should be
laid out as follows

1. A fully working Control Panel Namespace
2. The ability to embed the Control Panel window in a native window
3. Have a collection of applets to configure wine

I don't know who is mentoring this project so I think we should get
their thoughts on it.

Thanks
-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo