ubuntu-wine team mailing list archive

[Steve Dodier <sidnioulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello folks,

This email was meant to be sent to Scott Ritchie, but as he doesn't answer,
i fear it went to junk, so i'm re-sending through the mailing list. Also, I
thought someone would like to append comments / idea on it.

Something else, who will for sure be at the next UDS ?

Cordially, SD.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steve Dodier <sidnioulz@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: 2009/4/4
Subject: Ubuntu in Wine
To: scottritchie@xxxxxxxxxx


Hello Scott,

I read BetterWineIntegration (for the second time, since i read it before
joining the Ubuntu Wine Team a while ago ;) ), and i've had a few things
coming to my mind. As i don't know wether or not i'll be at the UDS, and as
i very dislike editing wiki pages (meh :p), i thought i'd mail you my
thoughts about the specs you wrote, so here be it :



________________________________________
Packaging Windows apps in .deb :

How to install ? i don't think we want to rewrite installers that will fill
registry and copy files, so do we run the windows installer upon app install
? What if the installer fails, should we find a way to tell apt/dpkg that
installing the package failed ?



________________________________________
Integration into GNOME

- Clicking .exe : Isn't this doable via adding a single mimetype in GNOME ?
What happens in GNOME if you open a .7z file without p7zip installed, for
instance ? (i'm asking because i don't run GNOME :p). At least we must
remove the mimetype that associates Win32 binaries to file-roller.

- Applications menu's name : i'm against naming it Windows instead of Wine.
Nothing would bug me more, as a linux user, than having "Windows" written
anywhere on my PC :)

- Wine apps menu items : placing them in a submenu related to what they do
would be great, but its only possible for apps that we ship within .deb
packages, by manually making the menu items, because there obviously is no
way to guess what category an app should go in, neither is a way to keep an
exhaustive list of apps with their associated category. I'm more for leaving
it as it is, and finding a way to help users to move their shortcuts (apart
from the .deb case).

- Another suggestion : we should be able to find out what are
uninstall/doc/editor's website menu items and remove them upon install, to
keep it approximately readable for the user (because windows apps love to
create 10 useless/spam shortcuts for 1 useful one). We could then move the
remaining items to Wine/ or Wine/Programs/ directly, to make them faster to
access.



________________________________________
winecfg additional options

- I suppose we'll have to rewrite winecfg as a GTK app, but i don't know if
it's technically possible. Either, we gotta ask wine devs how to send dbus
signals / call commands via a wine app to the linux box, so we can directly
use their winecfg.

- Here i'm quoting you :

    * (unchecked by default) Automatically launch applications upon
inserting a disc            +1, this is an important feature to add

    * (radio button default): Allow full screen applications to change the
resolution
    * (radio button alternate): Contain full screen applications in a window
when smaller...    I propose we keep winecfg's current form, and then we add
per-app options (i'll explain that below).

- What we can do is merge the winecfg and wine app installer/uninstaller
(yeh, they have one, now :p). My idea is that we change the "apps" tab in
winecfg, and here put a list of currently installed apps (with their version
/ wineprefix written), and we add the buttons "Uninstall", "Advanced
settings" for each app (see below). We also add a "Install apps" button, and
why not a "Install an app in a particular prefix" button (or any other GUI
feature for installing an app explicitely in its own prefix).

-- Standalone apps : we can add, in the "Applications" tab, a button to
"register" a standalone app (it always happens to have some of these in
windows), and then the registered app would appear in the list of installed
apps, and thus the user could modify its per-app settings with the same
interface.

-- For the apps that dont wanna uninstall (or that were manually removed),
we could just add a link that would clean the regedit entry and remove the
app from the list.

- For the per-app settings, it's almost a fork of winecfg, since now winecfg
allows per-app settings for almost everything (apart from sound settings /
desktop integration).

- We could add a wineprefixes tab that would allow modifying the
wineprefixes / installing dotnet/vcrun/dx9 via winetricks easily (if we can
legally do it, ofc).



________________________________________
winecfg additional options

- Wine fonts : we can add a "recommands msttcorefonts" to wine, it'd help
for a lot of font troubles. Also, shipping "Sans" (or the future default
font in karmic) to wine will be helpful, for Wine's desktop integration.

- Theme : nothing to add to what you said. i'm a total noob with msstyles
thing so i cant help here, but it would be awesome to manage to get a theme
for all the community themes, and package them in a wine-themes .deb.




________________________________________
Documentation

- I don't know the status of the documentation, but if you wanna ship it in
a more proper way, and possibly add a "wine doc" menu item, i'll be able to
help you write/review the doc, and to make the whole french translation.




________________________________________
On First Run

- First run is actually wineprefix creation. A less intrusive solution to a
popup window would be a notification (and we have a nice notify server now,
don't we ? :D) saying Wine is creating a fake windows install (or w/e for
the formulation), this takes only 15 secs and is a one-time thing.

- Browse C:\ Drives : i'm for turning this into a Browse wineprefixes thing,
and we could create a folder such as ".config/wine/prefixes" containing
symlinks to the wine prefixes (or to their c:\ drives).




________________________________________
Gecko / Mono integration

- I don't know anything about Gecko, but making a wine-mono package would be
awesome, esp. since it removes most of the needs for dotnet2 and dotnet3,
that are very big dependencies on windows. I think this is a major issue.



I think i said most of what i had in mind. I'm going to have free time in
the summer and am willing to help you. The first thing we need to go is to
begin working, and i think it'll go on quite well from there. I'm very
unexperienced with Linux programming / app packaging, but willing to learn
(and, at least i think, capable of learning).

Cordially, SD.

-- 
Steve Dodier
OpenPGP : 0E5E4ECB
IRC : SiDi on irc.freenode.net
Jabber : sidi@xxxxxxxxxxxx

sidnioulz@xxxxxxxxx
steve.dodier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

https://launchpad.net/~sidnioulz <https://launchpad.net/%7Esidnioulz>



-- 
Steve Dodier
OpenPGP : 0E5E4ECB
IRC : SiDi on irc.freenode.net
Jabber : sidi@xxxxxxxxxxxx

sidnioulz@xxxxxxxxx
steve.dodier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

https://launchpad.net/~sidnioulz