RFC: reducing wasted disk space from addon files

[Hans Leidekker]

On Tue, 2019-03-12 at 11:34 -0500, Vincent Povirk wrote:
> I think the simplest thing will be to duplicate this logic in mscoree,
> except that mscoree will not do its own download. Instead of looking
> for wine-mono-4.8.0.msi in those directories, mscoree will look for a
> directory named wine-mono-4.8.0. If it doesn't find that directory in
> any of the above locations, it will fall back on appwiz.cpl, which
> will still look for a .msi in all of those places, downloading and
> caching it if necessary, the way it does now.
> 
> That should cover everyone's use cases at least as well as the current
> solution, and it won't require anyone building or packaging wine to
> change anything. It will be necessary to replace the .msi with a
> directory (built from the source tarball or extracted from a binary
> tarball on winehq) if packagers want to take advantage of this work to
> reduce prefix size.

Did you consider using the existing msi for the shared scenario? You'd
run the installer like this in each prefix (without mono installed):

$ wine msiexec /i wine-mono-4.8.0.msi MONOBASEDIR=z:/home/user/shared_mono/wine-mono-4.8.0

The package would need an extra registry entry that saves MONOBASEDIR,
which would then be read by mscoree.get_mono_path().

One should be careful not to remove the package from any of the prefixes,
but perhaps that's not too much of a concern when the prefixes are managed.