RFC: reducing wasted disk space from addon files

[Jacek Caban]

Hi,


Let me put Wine Gecko into design consideration again, mostly because 
it's simpler and I'd like to preserve that simplicity. Wine Gecko may be 
considered a just another library in a distro. The fact that it's a PE 
file is really just an implementation detail. From distro point of view, 
it may be treated just like any other .so library: just install it into 
the right place in a shared location. MSHTML would just find and try to 
use it. If it can be found, no MSI is involved at all. Otherwise the old 
way is used and installation is not shared. It's both simple and reliable.


I know that Wine Mono is more complicated because it needs additional 
setup, but it's not a reason to make the whole process too complicated. 
I do not see how doing shared installation in appwiz.cpl helps with 
anything. appwiz.cpl already caches downloaded MSI files and does the 
installation in the most reliable way, which is a good for situations 
where we need to recover from an invalid setup.


It still seems to me that doing the additional Wine Mono setup using a 
separated small MSI file located in a shared location together with 
other Mono files would be a cleaner solution than attempting shared 
installation inside appwiz.cpl or refcounted shared MSI install.


Jacek