Hi,
I'm Ray, and I am a wine addict. ;)
Seeing how a big step is made, I thought I'd drop a line concerning the "new way" to configure wine.
First off, it's great to have some GUI to setup wine, though the config file was kind of handy and simple to use. There had to be changes with the winecfg tool though. But seeing how the configuration now is plainy stuffed into the "normal" registry, and how the important keys are simply get mixed up with other stuff makes me wonder if it could be done otherwise. I also wondered why exactly the registry is used for wine configuration and not a single config file? Winecfg could store the exactly same settings in the config file, too. Of course, on one hand to be as much "windows-ish" as possible, the registry seems to be the way, on the other hand, since wine comes from the linux side, I cannot really see some argument against ONE SINGLE easy-to-handle config file.
From the aspect of a GUI usage, I can't think of an real difference between
both, except where the settings are stored. I might miss something else as well, though.
But secondly, the winecfg tool is basically not usable for a basic setup or the switch from config file to the registry (yet). In other words, I based my configuration on the Sidenet-configuration-tool once and simply can't be bothered to hack all those DLL settings in via the GUI. And this everytime I have to reconfigure or setup (a new) wine. And there are more settings than just the DLL ones. Of course, once the basic configuration is done, one could use the registry editor to export a couple .reg files for later reimports. Basically it is what I do/did, I just "patched" the Sidenet-1.8.2-script to import .reg files, of course shortly before 1.8.3 came out ;* So I now ended up in doing it the .INF-file way .. it appears to be the best one for script based setup, too. But using simply and ONLY winecfg for setting wine up is hardly practicable if you have an existing configuration to implement.
Editing the .reg files in an editor is somewhat strange since all the registrykeys are re-arranged every time wine is started, that means a lot of searching, especially if software has been installed. It also appears there is no coherent block of wine configuration settings, which was some kind of advance for the config file. Another advance was the ability to comment things out in the config file, if you do it the same way in the .reg file it gets deleted with the next wine start.
A possible solution is not to comment the whole line out, but change the key's name (e.g. "comctl32"="native" => ";comctl32"="native"). But that again causes the key to be re-arranged and you have to find it again. Granted, using this example it is just moved up to the beginning of the section, plus you can see all the "commented" keys at once.. on the other hand, I don't really know what happens with those keys, since they are not really taken out of the configuration. And it's not very handy to delete and recreate those entries via winecfg in case of error/bug search or whatever. There is an option "disable" on the libraries tab, but it seems to completely disable the use of a DLL. (Err.. just like it says ^^)
Speaking of comments, there is also no possibility to comment sections in the configuration anymore, which make it difficult to always remember why a setting has been made, what are there for options etc. This is not good, and even more if the whole configuration stuff is not arranged using my (the users) order/system but wine's :~
I think some im- and export interface for settings in the winecfg tool could be useful. (Using Sidenet seems to be useful, too, but .. I don't think it'd be too much of a redundance :D) Maybe there also should be some kind of description/comment lines available in the GUI. And I think it would be nice to have a way to disable a setting (read: comment out), mostly and especially on the libraries tab.
And what I would like to see is some extra .reg file like "wine.reg" where all (real) wine related stuff is stored. This way one can simply transfer wine settings from one wine instance to another without having any worries about accidently catching some keys made by other software. "Native" editing would be much more simpler, too. Another advantage would be that one can easily "reset" a screwed configuration by restoring a backup of the file without the risk of screwing registry entries of installed software.
And finally, there is the documentation issue. Many basic config file sections and options are documented, but not all, most of them can be simply "converted" to the registry ones, some of them are commented in the source but may lack of documentation, some are just .. however, the point I am trying to make is, that guessing things because they are undocumented is something from the windows world I do not really want to be "emulated" with wine. ;D
-Rayston