So, I talked with Chris and here are some tasks remaining on winecfg. All of these are *easy* and can be done by anybody who has basic coding ability. For a few of them you don't even really need to know C! So come on lurkers, I know you're out there, step on up.
Things that need to be done before we should switch to winecfg IMHO are:
* Windows Look has no associated edit control. Who modifies this setting these days anyway? I vote for killing the label rather than adding the edit.
* UseTakeFocus (FIXME) - why is this a setting in the UI? I don't even know what the UseTakeFocus protocol does, I've certainly never tweaked it. Does it need to be there? At the very least it needs to be rephrased into terms people can understand and the FIXME needs to be removed.
* In the Drives tab, the top half is full of widgetry we probably don't want anymore. In particular "Use real windows drive" etc doesn't make much sense, you can just change the c: mapping to get that effect and it's not something we want to encourage anyway. Especially as most people these days seem to use XP rather than Win98 using a real windows drive is fast way to get an inoperable Wine as well as (possibly) a torched Windows install if it's on FAT32 and you can even pick up viruses from them.
I kid you not, the other day I ran a program that had been sitting on my Windows XP partition for a few months and my virtual windows drive (I think the term virtual rather than fake sounds better) ended up infected with some W32.Bagle variant.
Anyway the top half of this tab doesn't do anything, never did, doesn't make any sense and should just be removed.
* We should probably merge the X11 Driver and Audio tabs together as they both have lots of empty space, and rename it to "Audio and Video" or something. I think the term "X11 Driver" doesn't make much sense to many people anyway.
Minor cosmetic fix: remove the groupbox on the "about" tab, it doesn't provide any information at all. We also may want to stick the authors list in there, as it's a bit more visible than in the shell32 about box which is hardly ever shown. But obviously these things should not block us switching to it.
Once those things are done we can apply the patch to switch Wine to using the registry entirely. Is it worth writing a migration tool?
I'm not really sure, I guess some people would like their settings preserved but most of the settings people tweak are just check boxes in the new UI anyway and would take like 5 seconds to restore. AppDefaults are a bigger issue but do many people have lots of these?
Oh, final thing, we need to double check that removing the config doesn't regress things. I've been running with no config file for a few months now and while there are a few minor things I don't think they are critical. I may well have missed things though.
thanks -mike