On Friday 01 November 2002 11:35 am, Jeremy White wrote:
In responding to Dimi's call for better binary packaging, and the whole issue of getting a base line config ready, it felt clear to me that WineSetupTk is a tool that is underutilized.
probably. any tool that can read in a config file, make significant changes, and spit them back out without pulverizing is a decent accomplishment, and inclusion in wine would certainly encourage further development of the features, and default config, provided by the tool itself.
Right off the bat, one thing comes to mind that could make things a lot nicer in the wine universe: instead of the wine invocation wrapper script just copying stuff from /etc (or wherever) for new users, it could optionally invoke WineSetupTk. This would give windows converts a warm-fuzzy feeling, I bet.
I have been trying to persuade Alexandre to include WineSetupTk in the main Wine distribution for some time now, and have always failed. (Alexandre is rightly concerned about increasing the dependencies in Wine).
OK, how about a conditional dependency? The linux kernel certainly hasn't fallen into disuse due to the "xsetup" feature. Certainly examples of the neccesary autoconf magic to detect and use itcl/tcl/tk are easily found.
We would create a parallel CVS tree to Wine; say the winesetuptk tree. We'd put that code out under a dual license (GPL/but we still own rights). I'd probably welcome multiple maintainers.
I'm new around here, so I am happy to defer to the judgement of more wizened folks on this issue; but doesn't wine have enough code-forks already?
The only thorny issue is that we share code between WineSetupTk and some of our proprietary pieces. We could shift our main WineSetupTk development to this tree, and share the common bits, including our developments as we make them. However, in exchange, we would need anyone making changes to WineSetupTk to grant us a license to use their changes in our proprietary stuff. (And, of course, if we ever abuse this, someone can take the GPL tree and go host it somewhere else).
hmmm... well this is all up to you of course. I took a look at the license included with WineSetupTk, and it looks pretty darn liberal to me, so I kind of feel like I'm missing your point...?