[GSoC] My proposal for GSoC 2013

[Gediminas Jakutis]

Hello!

My name is Gediminas Jakutis. I study Informatics Engineering
[bachelor / undergraduate] at Kaunas University of Technology, second
year.
I wish to try out GSoC for the first time by helping to improve Wine.
My primary programming language is C. I am self-taught in C, but I
believe my knowledge is good enough.
I am quite familiar with Wine - I use it and experiment with it for
many years now. I am subscribed to and read wine-devel for more than a
year.
I browse through Wine's source code once in a while out of curiosity.
Thus, I have some knowledge of its structure.
Sadly, I have not written any patches for Wine yet. Mostly due to lack
of confidence.

For GSoC, I am suggesting my own idea. In case this idea is not good,
I am open to changing it, thinking of a new one, or adopting one.
My idea: I have noticed that Wine's virtual desktop feature is very
limited - if the first program on a prefix starts without a virtual
desktop, all programs launched during the same session also start
without a VD, disregarding any VD settings and/or requests with
environment variables. And vice versa - if the first program starts
inside a VD, all other programs in that sessions start in the VD.
Often, this can be worked around by using separate Wine prefixes. Yet
sometimes, this workaround is not possible. A good example: steam and
games that only run properly in a VD. This forces the user to start
steam in a VD and makes steam itself unusable while a game is running,
especially if the game does not support the steam overlay. I would
like to fix this limitation and make it possible to properly choose to
run different programs on one prefix with or without a VD regardless
what was chosen to programs already running in that prefix. I can
already see this requiring changes in the winecfg utility, by the way.
In case this turns out to be too easy of a project, I could implement
some way to perform "alt-tabbing" between programs in a VD and/or an
optional (enable-able in winecfg) rudimentary taskbar for
changing/checking focus.

I am very excited about participating in GSoC. And even more excited
about starting to contribute to Wine by writing patches!
Regardless if I get accepted or not, I wish to make Wine better. Thus,
expect me to start submitting patches in the future even if I do not
get accepted. ;]

Sincerely,
Gediminas Jakutis

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