http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16325
--- Comment #146 from Michal Suchanek hramrach@gmail.com 2012-02-07 05:22:21 CST --- Hello,
I suggest that the registry patch generated dynamically by Wine should not be saved in the registry files on disk.
That way users can patch their registry and have their patches in effect but wine would automatically generate font links when fonts are available for the current locale and manual font links are not in place.
You could do the same with font replacements. You could have Wine search for font in compatible encoding, and possibly have a list of preferred fonts that is configured in registry and can be updated by distributors and users.
If tagging the registry entries as volatile inside wine is too difficult you can just write the settings twice - once in the standard location and once in some location like HKLM/Software/Wine/Autogenerated/path/to/autogenerated/value. That way you will know if the entry in system registry matches the last autogenerated entry. As a hint these should be then set to empty when a value would be autogenerated but is set already.
Note that on Windows the font links are autogenerated and probably overwritten on locale change but there you do not have to deal with picking different fonts, the fonts are hardcoded. Wine has to do differently here (eg. pick up font changes).
Font substitutions should not be touched by wine. They are standard part of Windows registry that is only configured by user or installation programs. It might be useful to have per-application font substitutions but that can be solved by installing problematic applications in separate prefix, the same as applications that require specific libraries, etc.