RFC: wineprefix manager

[Steven Edwards]

Hello,
Over the past few months I've been developing a tool that I had hoped
to demo at wineconf before my laptop started acting up. It is a Wine
Prefix Manager I developed for Bordeaux, At this time its still tied
pretty closely to glib and GTK and riddled with my horrid programing
errors. Attached you will find a screenshot of the concept we are
using in Bordeaux

I've spoken with Alexandre a bit about it and he expressed interested
in possibly having it be a winelib application. This would pose some
interesting design decisions as we would need to create a method of
having a wine delay certain operations until after the program exited
or be able to run a builtin winelib application outside of any given
prefix.

My development plan short term is pretty simple:

1. Develop this application in tools/wineprefixmanager and allow third
parties to develop graphical interfaces using the toolkit of choice.
This would allow a KDE, GTK or even winelib frontend to do prefix
management

2. a. Extra wineprefixes would be stored in the ~/.wineprefixes
folder. If a user wants to use multiple prefixes one must be set to
default which would create a symbolic link to ~/.wine
    b. This implies the ability to import an existing ~/.wine

3. As Wine's ability to interact with the Desktop Environment of
choice improves, so would the options for prefix management (as
implied by the associate option in the example below)

4. As Wine develops better multiuser support, support for other
locations for storage of Global prefixes will have to be taken in to
account.

Alexandre also raised the question about if this would even really be
all that useful. Below are the possible command line options we could
support:

Possible command line options include
  --active                 set a selected prefix as active or default
  --associate              restore file associations
  --backup                 backup a selected prefix to a compressed archive
  --configure              invoke winecfg after creation
  --copy                   copy a selected prefix to another name
  --create                 create based on a template such as
 default, win2000, winxp, etc.
  --delete                 delete a selected prefix
  --execute                execute a windows application for a given prefix
  --force                  force operation without prompting
  --import                 import from and existing .wine directory
  --restart                simulate a windows reboot for a given prefix
  --restore                restore prefix from existing archive
  --list                   display a list of the current prefixes
  --menu                   regenerate Desktop and Menu entries
  --target                 TARGET option for --backup --copy and --create

If there are no major objections and or no better ideas then over the
next few months I will start refactoring the mess that is the Bordeaux
Cellar Manager, breaking it out in to a non-glib command line only
application, removing Bordeaux only options, submitting it as a series
of patches, etc.

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
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