http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8033
--- Comment #39 from James Hawkins truiken@gmail.com 2007-10-06 19:27:39 --- (In reply to comment #38)
(In reply to comment #37)
It sounds like you're adding registry entries from Windows to make the app work in the first place. Is that the case?
Of course not; the missing registry entries were presumably installed by either the application itself or its installation process. (It's Windows - Windows applications do that sort of thing!)
What missing registry entries? Are you copying over the app installation from a Windows install?
And yes, this is a regression of sorts in that I installed the application with Wine 0.9.3x and it broke when I upgraded to Wine 0.9.35. The fix posted in bug #8033 kept me running until 0.9.42 was released and then bug #9147 broke it again.
Keeping a wineprefix between version is extremely common, but you miss the point that it's not guaranteed to work.
No, I get that it's not guaranteed to work. It's the "(lack of) what happens next" that I am having trouble with. In particular, your "sanitized" wineprefix approach that just looks like a back-handed way of telling your users to go away and reinstall all their applications.
If you're going to create mandatory registry entries in Wine that will make Wine crash/explode if they're not present then you need to find a way to update the .reg files in users' .wine/ directories too. Or put all these critical entries into an unmodifiable wine.reg file that every wine installation loads at start up. Or SOMETHING.
What mandatory registry entries are you talking about? Registry entries are created *only* when you run wineprefixcreate, so you have to remove the old .wine and generate a new .wine. This also gets rid of any cruft from installing other apps that may interfere with the bug (installation and uninstallation in Wine is not complete and that's another reason why this is the policy).
Because no-one who installs Wine as binary packages is *ever* going to be interested in recreating his/her .wine directory each time they update. E.g. do you have any idea how much work is involved to install World of Warcraft, with all of its patches and expansion packs?
Do you read what I say?
$ mv .wine .wine-save $ wineprefixcreate $ test app $ mv .wine-save .wine
voila! Your old apps are back...