[Wine] Help installing software with multiple cd's

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

"vitamin" <winehq.org!wineforum-user at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> perryh wrote:
> > Ideally, wine would figure out that the application has
> > requested a disk change
>
> They never do. They just tell user to put next CD.

Telling the user to put in the next CD is exactly what I mean by
"requesting a disk change."

> There is no way for Wine to know about this. The only thing Wine
> might do is to listen to dbus/HAL for the unmount request from
> user (when user pushes the button to eject CD).

Or it could notice that the app has put up a modal dialog containing
text that asks for the next CD.  Yes, that sort of recognition could
be tricky -- probably no two installers use exactly the same message
-- which is why I acknowledged that it might amount to a Turing test.
It is surely possible in principle, but not necessarily practical.

> perryh wrote:
> > What *could* be done would be to access removable devices
> > (at least, CDs and floppies) without having them mounted,
>
> Nothing. This is not Wine's job to mount devices.

Not to mount them, but to access them without needing them to be
mounted.  This would be a much better match to Windows, which has
no concept of mounting and unmounting removable disks, and it would
not be difficult to do for floppies and other FAT-formatted disks
because the functionality is already implemented in mtools.  All
that's needed is for wine to call mtools to read files instead of
accessing them via the filesystem.  Of course mtools would need to
be given the proper device name, which wine can get by reading the
a:: (or d::, etc.) symlink.

I don't know offhand whether a similar tool already exists for CDs,
but if not it might be worth writing one since it would solve the
mount/unmount problem once and for all.