On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Emmanuel Maillardmahanuu@free.fr wrote:
But it's an external appplication, your desktop environment, that handle *.desktop file; wine just generate them...
As per the private email I sent. I could see that working if we can convince Alexandre of the need of an external helper application for OS X. Keeping the existing winemenubuilder code mostly as is and having it write xdg menus and associations would be pretty simple. We could just change a few lines to have it write xdg in ~/Library/Application Support/Wine/WineMenuBuilder
So don't choose ~/Applications but : /Applications/Wine or let's the user to choose if want an Applications folder in is Homedir.
The reason for using ~/Applications as opposed to /Applications is that Wine has no knowledge or real support for multi-user prefixes. Each .wine being local to the user that creates it will have their own applications, etc. If we write the menus to /Applications and another user logs in then they won't be able to run those applications.
False with WineHelper : User opens HomeDirectory or Finder User goes to desired path and selects Winword.exe (.msi, .lnk) (Helper start if needed) Winwords start as intuitive as your Case 2 ...
If the associations for Wine and the given type are set right (*.exe, *.msi, *.lnk, *.whatever) then I could see this working at least for a default WINEPREFIX. All of that assumes the executable and or links are easy to find and we have the virtual start menu. Again the problem I see is if your setting associations for installed applications it makes supporting a given prefix not really possible.
WineHelper is Open Source so you can add any features you want, fork it, ask write access to Darwine CVS, send me patches (i must still have write access)
I don't really know what I want besides a simple way to access installed applications. Bundles give me that, though I can see how a helper might have some advantages. Honestly though, I don't have the free cycles to write one. I've spent over a month or two just researching Bundles vs Finder Aliases and HFS resource forks trying to come up with a seemless solution and you see how little I've written.
So please just use /Applications or ask the user if he want an a new directory in his Homedir.
If its truly a single user system then prompting one time for a location, either /Applications or ~/Applications seems like the right method to me.
For me though it all comes back down to supporting future design like better prefix support while making it work today. I'm going to revise my patch to support direct execution of shell scripts and clean it up so that its not such a hack with the existing xdg code an resubmit. Assuming Alexandre accepts that, there is nothing stopping us from developing something better down the road but for now, users will have a Wine they can actually use once they have apps installed.