RFC: reducing wasted disk space from addon files

[Vincent Povirk]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 7:35 AM André Hentschel <nerv at dawncrow.de> wrote:
> Can't we keep the shared stuff in the home directory? It would be
> user-wide instead of system-wide, but already a reduction and we
> wouldn't need to mess with access restrictions in /usr. Possible naming:
> $HOME/.wine-addons-gecko $HOME/.wine-addons-mono

The default /usr permissions should be fine. I'm not proposing we
share anything that Wine needs write access to.

BTW, when I said /usr, what I meant was that we base it on where Wine
is installed. I don't think we should use a hard-coded path in /usr.

> Another idea would be to outsource this topic to steam or even better
> winetricks. Most filesystems in use support hardlinks, a winetricks verb
> with wine prefixes as arguments that hardlinks all gecko/mono stuff in
> them (if their shaXXX hash match) looks very easy and suitable to me and
> steam could use it too. That way the prefix remains transferable.

I would not be comfortable hardlinking or symlinking any files that
are managed by msi to shared locations. Things could easily go wrong
when someone tries to remove or upgrade the msi.