[Wine]Thanks for WineTools! - Ideas for improvement

Roman Stöckl-Schmidt roman at stoeckl-schmidt.de
Sat Mar 12 03:48:54 CST 2005


Joe Baker schrieb:

> Some ideas for future development.
>
> Targeting alternative directories other than ~/.wine perhaps in a
> shared area or in ~/.wine1 ~/.wine2, etc...
>
> It would also be nice to have a common winetools/sys directory where
> cached downloads can be retrieved.
>
I'd like to second that: It might just be useful to ask the user wether
he has an already downloaded version of the program he is trying to
install and give him the option to enter the path in case he has one.
This is very useful if someone has e.g. tried to install ie6, dcom98
et.al. without winetools before; has it on his native windows partition;
has a cd containing it, etc.
For dial-up users like myself this would be a huge relief. If for
example with ie some components winetools wants to have installed
initially haven't been downloaded yet, the installer will automatically
get them anyway and there's no need for the user to have to find out
where winetools looks for the already installed files (e.g.
~/winetools/sys I think for dcom98).

> A feature of installing useful Windows DLLS from Windows CDs.

It would be of great importance for this feature to use something like
cabextract, otherwise one wouldn't be able to get the stuff from a
windows installation CD-ROM.

> Restructuring the WineConfigurations to allow multiple users to run
> applications from various wine environments.  I'm beginning to see how
> this might be done.  Each user having different dosdevices files,
> command lines specifying different wineservers, configuration files,
> etc...
>
> For instance, I might want to have three "Windows Installations"
> because I have three versions of a program that I need to run, and
> they don't want to co-exist on the same Windows installation. 
> Now I have say 40 users who need to be able to run all three programs
> at the same time.

Setting aside the permission thing you were talking about after this I'd
like to add something else.
This is not really winetools but rather wine specific but I think it
would definitely improve the users (and developers, since they naturally
use it to) experience. I'd love to see programs and their configs
installed to their own path instead of everything to ~/.wine/[c_drive |
fake_windows]/Program Files and ~/.wine/config like Transgamings
Point2Play does (yes there is some good to learn from commercial wine
adaptions =)).
To be more precise one would still have ~/.wine/config and
~/.wine/[c_drive | fake_windows] as the default setup but every program
installed would create their modifications to that in thier own path,
like ~/.wine/$program/config and ~/.wine/$program/[c_drive |
fake_windows]. Additionaly for multi-user environments one could install
the programs to /opt/wine/$program, /usr/share/$program
/usr/local/share/$program depending on your distros/personal preference.
This way if you run into problems with an application installation were
you would normally have backed up ~/.wine before and would now remove it
and replace it with the backup version you could just remove the
$program directory and everything would be clean.
$program should be a unique identifier so when you execute for example
internet explorer 6 (id: ie6) which would need e.g. dcom98 (id: dcom98)
wine would first read the normal config and make it's default [drive_c |
fake_windows] available then the program specific config/path is read:
$wineroot/ie6/config and in here you'd have  a line like "include
'$wineroot/dcom98'", I guess you all get were I'm aiming at so I'll just
stop here.
The goal is just to have a really modular installation were you can have
programs run from your own or the shared directory every user in your
network uses and to avoid the hassle that presently exists when using
programs that cause problems...

What do you think about this?

Cordial greetings, Roman.



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