Hi,
Every Wine release more and more programs start to work on Wine. A serious problem is that not all programs can work out of the box. Some games for instance need the windows version to be set to Windows 95 or it will crash. Other games like Medal of Honour need their OpenGL extension string trimmed to get it to work on cards which support a lot of OpenGL extensions. There are dozens of more examples like that.
Microsoft is having similar troubles and since Windows 2000 they provide appcompat stuff for windows (in WinXP/Vista it is a default feature). It basically works on a database which is used somehow at program startup and which then applies 'fixes' like 'setting the windows version', patching function calls and more. See for instance http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457032.aspx for more info and pay attention to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457032.apcpxp06_big(en-us,techn... which shows a part of the list and the scope of it.
I think we have reached a point in Wine where we might need something similar :( Our compatibility seems to be bigger than XP/Vista so we might not need much. Perhaps we need to maintain some file which applies really needed fixups. It should be merged into the registry using wineprefixcreate and the database can be checked using winecfg. It would use normal AppDefaults.
What do you guys think about such a thing? I don't like it at all but I fear it is really needed. If we would add such I'm not sure if we are allowed to dump microsoft their database, looking at it might be something differently.
It might be a good topic for WineConf.
Regards, Roderick Colenbrander