Proposal: to make binfmt-misc with wine workable and make Wine compadiblity modes more like Windows compadiblity mode.

[Peter Dolding]

For binfmt-misc to be workable a few things need to be known.

1) What version of wine
2) What wineprefix
3) What setting overrides.

None of these can be done by environmental vars because binfmt-misc
might be directly executing the file.

Windows compadiblity mode does not use the registry like wine does.
Instead it done in two horible halves.

Half 1.   The   application manifest file.   The mainfest file may be
embedded in the .exe file or be .exe.mainfest
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848036%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Yes this is where you set what version of Windows application was
designed to run with.   So running XP mode on Windows 7 is here.

Half 2. Application Compatilibity Database
This is where it gets horible using shims on particular executables to
make broken executables work.   Also when this gets too large starts
slowing windows down as it searching the database to make applications
work.   Yes reason some old applications don't work with Windows 10
that worked with 7 is that their entries were deleted from this
database.

To solve the problem I think we could get away with just Half the
manifest can include library overrides and some windows configuration
tweaks.   But we have problems the include library information wine
needs because of native and built-in libraries.   Due to the fact wine
is running on Linux and other OS's some of the configuration tweaks
are going to be wine dependant.   So we need another schema.


http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys
Because if Microsoft manifest would tolerate alien schema  really
everything under software\wine\appdefaults could be moved from the
registry to the manifest.   Advantage 1 this can be write protected
per application and second advantage possibility of embedding in the
exe itself.


Also for binfmt-misc support have in the schema the means to record
wineprefix and wine to use.   So the program starting wine
applications by binfmt-misc looks for either a mainfest or a
winemainfest file in the same directory as the exe to see what wine
environment the application should be running with.   If there is no
configured environment possibly ask user what wineprefix they do what
to run the application with.

What I do not know is if Microsoft application manifest file will
tolerate an alien schema.   Don't have different versions of Windows
to test if Microsoft application manifest with a alien schema parts
works or just causes windows to throw error or just results in the
manifest being complete ignored.

Now if Microsoft application manifest will not tolerate alien I have
to ask would creating own own like exe.winemainfest be acceptable.

I do hope Microsoft application manifest will tolerate alien because
it would be really useful to have applications with a manifest a
values saying what versions of wine they were tested with by the
maker.   Currently there is no way for a application vendor to record
in the application they tested with wine.

A lot of ways putting what shim modifications the application need in
the manifest would also remove having to look up a huge database.

Getting binfmt-misc working also will remove having to use setcap on
wineloader instead of the .exe.   Also would make if someone set a
capicapity  limitation by logind not break every wine application just
because a few application where needing privileged operation..

So this alteration would be getting closer to how Windows does stuff
and in the process making Linux integration better.

Peter Dolding