Best way to overlay a filesystem for a Wine app?

[Dan Kegel]

Hi Scott,
I agree with what Vrit said.

Here's what I recall learning from helping package Picasa:
- don't package the installer
- rely on the system's update manager to pull updated versions of the
package from the repository
- install everything read-only into /opt/companyname/appname
- start the app using a shell script that creates a wineprefix on 1st run
- The wineprefix should have real directories (so the app can create
files in Program Files, ugh), should symlink to all the readonly files
in /opt, and have real copies of any files that can't be read-only
As Vrit said, the script that creates the wineprefix is very
app-specific, but once you write one, it's probably easy to write the
next one.
- If you are running your own repo, you should put exactly one app per
repo.  Otherwise you run into trouble because Canonical would want to
review all the apps in the repo every time you update any one of them.

So no overlay filesystem needed, symlinks should usually suffice.

(Picasa also went further and bundled a snapshot of wine, too, and
modified the app slightly to display unix paths, which required adding
one little extension to wine.  I'm sure the wine patch is around if
someone wants it.  And since it was in a non-ubuntu repo, it had to do
a strange song and dance to avoid autoupdates being disabled when the
user upgraded to a new version of ubuntu.  This was considered safe
because picasa was fairly well self-contained and maintained, and was
unlikely to break on system updates.)

In case you want to look at picasa's scripts, the download page seems
to be gone, but the repo seems to still be there:

http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_3.0-current_i386.deb
http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/picasa/picasa_3.0-current_amd64.deb
4ecf30186ce76430a7791cee2608f47e07b015e6  picasa_3.0-current_amd64.deb
fe8e83b29a10b5d663e87861d85512faea036c06  picasa_3.0-current_i386.deb

Still installs and runs ok on 11.10.