On Wednesday 10 October 2007 12:47:16 Szabolcs Szakacsits wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Kai Blin wrote:
Szabolcs, the biggest reason why we don't tell people to run applications from an NTFS partition is not strictly a technical one but just the fact that people then try to run applications they installed under windows. This will fail for almost every application that depends on certain registry entries being created by the install process.
Thank you for the explanation.
Could the windows registry entries be mapped to the one wine needs? I guess nobody expects instant 100% success but if the most important ones could cover over 90% of the apps then that could be a decent start and worth improving and maintaining in the future.
Well, reading the registry is not that much of a problem. For all I know the Wine registry is 100% compatible with the Windows one.
Unfortunately the only feedback which arrives to us is that wine users are annoyed/confused by the separate installation for wine. Apparently this is a major wine usability and adaption problem.
Think of this as "sharing one registry between different versions of Windows". It is likely doing this will screw up one of your Windows installs, so you're better off not doing this at all. I don't think this is a problem Wine can fix.
People need to start realizing that a different WINEPREFIX install is like a separate operating system install for all the applications would care. I don't think there's much of an issue with the WINEPREFIX directory being located on an external disk drive that contains an NTFS file system. However, that is different from running the applications you installed under Windows.
Similar things would apply if I mounted my ext2 hdd from Windows and tried running an application that was installed in Wine under Windows.
I agree that we probably shouldn't segfault in that case.
Cheers, Kai