I read your story about winetools a couple weeks ago around the same time that I tried using winetools on FC5 test 3, it didn't go well with winetools and I was looking for another solution and couldn't find one that fitted well with my criteria.
I started thinking of packages like RPMs and started breaking down a wine application installation into what we would need to run it directly from the application menu.
What I came up with this is, its pretty raw right now, its simply a small self contained package for managing the install process of a wine application, soon I'm going to start work on creating a package repository and the package browser but would really like to use the appdb for supplementary information, i.e. screenshots version compatibility etc...
http://www.qdh.org.uk/wordpress/?cat=6
I have also considered having a way of making apps install gobally on a machine so any and every user has access to them, and considered using inotify to watch events and provide a way of handling this.
This is still in the beginning stages and I would be grateful for any input you may have. I was very interested in what was published here,
http://www.winehq.org/?issue=308#Winetools..%20part%20II
I've looked through the winetools code and it is a clusterf*ck of nonsense. It appears to be in the final stages of code rot, however there are some useful little bits in there which I have been cannibalising when necessary into my own application. The beauty of this is that it is only an application shell, in theory the appdb could be the central configuration repository containing all the information to make an app work. Available apps can be browsed, downloaded if possible or installed from a cd drive with minimal fuss.
I have one other who has joined in the project, his name is Alex Doukas and I believe he has also recently joined wine-devel.
Right now we're at the stage of building up some script archives and starting to put together application packs for the most important stuff, I will be working on the downloaders/xml parsers within the next couple of weeks and hopefully we should soon have a working application where the community keeps it up to date.
To prevent duplication of work I would suggest that suggestions to my project will be accepted, I hope to provide some public space for bug tracking etc... in the next couple of weeks and even public SVN. I currently have this configured and running but unfortunately do not have a great deal of bandwidth. The more people who join in the better, python programmers especially welcome, any scripts should eventually be posted to the bugzilla. Once the application db and my application fit together nicely we could have users publishing scripts in the appdb.