Hello, Over the past few months I've been developing a tool that I had hoped to demo at wineconf before my laptop started acting up. It is a Wine Prefix Manager I developed for Bordeaux, At this time its still tied pretty closely to glib and GTK and riddled with my horrid programing errors. Attached you will find a screenshot of the concept we are using in Bordeaux
I've spoken with Alexandre a bit about it and he expressed interested in possibly having it be a winelib application. This would pose some interesting design decisions as we would need to create a method of having a wine delay certain operations until after the program exited or be able to run a builtin winelib application outside of any given prefix.
My development plan short term is pretty simple:
1. Develop this application in tools/wineprefixmanager and allow third parties to develop graphical interfaces using the toolkit of choice. This would allow a KDE, GTK or even winelib frontend to do prefix management
2. a. Extra wineprefixes would be stored in the ~/.wineprefixes folder. If a user wants to use multiple prefixes one must be set to default which would create a symbolic link to ~/.wine b. This implies the ability to import an existing ~/.wine
3. As Wine's ability to interact with the Desktop Environment of choice improves, so would the options for prefix management (as implied by the associate option in the example below)
4. As Wine develops better multiuser support, support for other locations for storage of Global prefixes will have to be taken in to account.
Alexandre also raised the question about if this would even really be all that useful. Below are the possible command line options we could support:
Possible command line options include --active set a selected prefix as active or default --associate restore file associations --backup backup a selected prefix to a compressed archive --configure invoke winecfg after creation --copy copy a selected prefix to another name --create create based on a template such as default, win2000, winxp, etc. --delete delete a selected prefix --execute execute a windows application for a given prefix --force force operation without prompting --import import from and existing .wine directory --restart simulate a windows reboot for a given prefix --restore restore prefix from existing archive --list display a list of the current prefixes --menu regenerate Desktop and Menu entries --target TARGET option for --backup --copy and --create
If there are no major objections and or no better ideas then over the next few months I will start refactoring the mess that is the Bordeaux Cellar Manager, breaking it out in to a non-glib command line only application, removing Bordeaux only options, submitting it as a series of patches, etc.
Thanks
