Issues with the registry font keys / entries

[Mihai Todor]

Hi Everyone,

I have spent some time trying to improve the font packages in
Winetricks and I've run into a few issues with Wine that I hope
someone can clarify. I agreed with Austin here
https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/issues/896 that it would be
best to get a wider audience on Wine Devel.

First of all, there is some logic somewhere in Wine which
automagically populates `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache` when font
files are copied into `.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts/`. The magic seems
to be based on inotify, but I don't understand well enough how it
works.

However, there seems to be a race issue between apps like regedit and
notepad and the above mechanism. For example, if I have the corefonts
installers cached under `.cache/winetricks/` and I run `winetricks
corefonts` and I start notepad immediately after, I notice that the
new fonts are not available. Worse, most times (not sure yet how to
reproduce it all the time) if I run regedit just after, the new fonts
never get added to `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`, which seems to be
the place from where Wine lists fonts through EnumFontFamiliesEx (try
running this code
https://github.com/kamwoods/FontAnalysis/blob/d894c082221912e72653ae76804a72f70c181861/FontFinder/FontFinder/FontFinder.cpp
just after installing corefonts). This happens on wine-3.0-rc2 and
older.

Is this the expected behaviour?

I'm also wondering why Wine doesn't also write the required entries
under `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows[\ NT]?\CurrentVersion\Fonts`
when it populates `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`. Is this a bug? Is
there a different way of registering fonts that Winetricks should use?
I'd be more than happy to remove this manual registry insertion code
from Winetricks...

And, I also noticed that a fresh wine install on Ubuntu 16 will
auto-populate both `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows[\
NT]?\CurrentVersion\Fonts` keys with the following fonts:
Courier -> coure.fon
MS Sans Serif -> sserife.fon
MS Serif -> serife.fon
Small Fonts -> smalle.fon

If I look in `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Cache`, I see that they are
located in `/opt/wine-devel/bin/../share/wine/fonts/`, so shouldn't
the above entries also point to the same location? And maybe not all
apps will like the `..` in the font path...

And, since we're here, I noticed that Winetricks registers font
replacements under `HKCU\Software\Wine\Fonts\Replacements`, but
doesn't add any entries to `HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes`. Does Wine completely ignore this
key?

Thank you,
Mihai