[Wine] multiple users on LINUX - way to share a single .wine

[James Mckenzie]

Gert van den Berg <wine-users at mohag.net> at Nov 7, 2008 10:13 AM wrote about [Wine] multiple users on LINUX - way to share a single .wine
>
>2008/11/7 Cai <microcai at sina.com>:
>> graysky 写道:
>>> Basically, I'd like to have just one .wine dir on my file system that multiple users on LINUX can share thus allowing me to keep a single install of my windows apps.  The default is to install to /home/CURRENT_USER/.wine so I'm wondering, as long as the LINUX users are in the same group, can I relocate the .wine dir to say, /home/share/.wine and update the wineconfig?  I just started using LINUX seriously so I'm pretty new at it.
>>>
>>> Thanks for the replies.
>> Share files under Linux is easy. The symbolic link file is the best.
>>
>which does not take into account race conditions and permission problems...
>
>mount --bind might work around some of those, but probably not the
>registry and race conditions issues...
>
>And Vitamin knows what he is talking about...
>
He may be abrupt, but he is correct.

>The safest method is probably to have a dedicated user account where
>wine is set up, a script to copy in to each user's home directory, (If
>wine does not use the user name in the registry somewhere...) change
>the permissions and run wine. Environment variables can be used to
>save the profile data somewhere where it will be persistent, and may,
>combined with cron even sync it. (Depending on how Wine handles
>locking it might be okay to share the whole drive_c without race
>conditions that is not present on Windows (I'm not familiar with file
>locking under *nix))

This does not avoid the multiple users accessing the same file and causing file corruption.  This would require the use of file flagging and other file handing processes.

The real question is why do you want only one .wine directory?  It is possible to install a program multiple times under Linux and then redirect a user to a particular installation on a shared drive.  I'm under the assumption that licensing issues are at the root of this issue and Wine should not be used to circumvent them.  If the issue is something else then explain why this is needed.  It may be necessary to submit a bug report.  Please keep in mind that this may not be implemented for a long time if ever.

James McKenzie