I have noticed that when wine creates a menu item (that for example, on Ubuntu gets put in the Applications > Wine > Programs menu), the command that gets written uses 'wine' as the program to run. This means that you need to have Wine in your PATH and cannot use more than one version of Wine. For example, if I wanted to use /opt/wine-1.0, /opt/crossover and /opt/wine for different applications I cannot access these correctly from the menu items created. Additionally, the user experience (yes, I have been watching Owen's Google talk :)) is that the application does not start (especially if the only version of Wine is not on the PATH).
The solution to this is to add the full path to wine, e.g. '/opt/wine-1.0/bin/wine' when generating the menus. Are there any objections to this?
This would probably seem sensible. It may cause some confusion for users if they do intentionally have multiple versions installed (knowing which items point to which version, etc), but unless one were to come up with some kind of "version switching" app that lets the user choose which version to run with, it would seem like it's the kind of thing we shouldn't be too bothered with.
Along similar lines, building on what Owen said in the talk that if all goes well Jane user will not notice that she is using Wine to run her Windows software: why is there an entry in the Applications section that says 'Wine' (and why does it have the folder icon and not the Wine icon)! It would be better if this said something like "Program Files", replacing Wine > Programs -- this removes a level of indirection and gives the user something that they are familiar with and is more discoverable than 'Wine'.
"Windows software" may be a better term than "Wine". "Program Files" wouldn't really make sense, since all the items in the Applications menu are meant to be program files. On the issue of whether we should keep the "Programs" subfolder, I guess you could transparently redirect things that try to create items there, and it would probably not cause too many problems. The current system though doesn't seem too bad.