Hi everyone, This is my first post on this mailing list. I am a newcomer to WINE development and hadn't touched this project prior to this year. Recently I have been trying to fix a few rough edges in WINE's shell functionality. Over the course of a few months I have accumulated quite a lot of open merge requests. For example, I have these ones related to fixing the display of icons for shortcuts (.lnk files), which are currently very broken in WINE: - shell32: When a shortcut has no custom icon, resolve target's icon https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11424 - shell32: Fix application of shortcut overlay with alpha channel https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11438 - explorer: Fix retrieving of Start Menu icons https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11443 I also have fixes for some other shell bugs: - Fix GUID paths not being accepted by ShellExecute and explorer's command-line arguments https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11709 - shell32: Include All Users/Public items in desktop shell folder https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/12053 I have some that aren't fixes so much as "features" or nice-to-haves: - wine.inf: Create Start Menu items for most GUI apps included with WINE https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/10867 - explorer: Accept 'fullscreen' as a size for the '/desktop=' flag https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/10883 - explorer: Add hotkeys for Start Menu, Run and Task Manager https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11338 - explorer: Taskbar appearance improvements https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/11575 Finally, there's this thing, which is difficult to categorise, and which benefits from many of the previously mentioned fixes: - explorer: Use real IShellView for desktop icons https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/12072 I wanted to bring these up on this list for two main reasons. Firstly, shell32 and explorer don't have anyone assigned in the MAINTAINERS file, so they don't get auto-assigned reviewers. I therefore am wondering what I should do about them. I could hunt through git logs and try to find someone appropriate to pester, but I feel quite rude doing that as a new contributor. So by making this email, I'm hoping I might catch someone's attention, or at least that someone might be able to give me guidance on how to find appropriate reviewers. Secondly, I'm curious about WINE developers' general attitude to these kinds of changes. As I understand it, WINE prioritises fixes that help app compatibility. Most of what I'm doing here does technically affect compatibility, in the sense that all the shell32 fixes involve testable aspects of the Windows API which an application could rely on. However, I'm really just trying to improve the usability of WINE's explorer here, and that's basically a synthetic target. So while the changes do make WINE's behaviour more accurate to Windows, I think you could argue this isn't really compatibility work. Ultimately I suppose I want to ask: are usability improvements in the shell desirable? There's many other little things I might want to fix still, like how explorer won't let you delete folders, create new folders, or rename things, even though all of this works in the Open/Save dialog. To provide some broader context, as some of you may be aware, I (under the pseudonym that my gitlab username is set to) am supposedly spearheading a project to try to use WINE as the basis of a Linux desktop environment. A lot of these changes are partly motivated by that effort. I'm well aware however that WINE doesn't want to be a desktop environment, so I don't intend to try to upstream anything too adventurous. In any case, as a Linux user I find myself using WINE all the time for various creative projects and to play games, and I make a lot of use of the WINE explorer just to browse to EXE files or shortcuts and launch them, because I find it more comfortable to browse WINE's Windows-like universe from within. So I am interested in dealing with shell32/explorer papercuts regardless, and incentivising myself and others to fix small usability issues in WINE is half the motivation for the desktop environment thing anyway. Thank you for reading, and I hope it was worth your time. Best regards, Andrea Faulds