- You never mentioned what you want this "front-end" to do. I think
that's pretty important to whatever you're talking about. Seems to me it might fit in with winecfg or something else that already exists.
- Did you read the thread(s) about rewriting WineTools that occurred
over the past few months? Are you reinventing that wheel?
- Putting a GUI toolkit dependency on Wine will never make everyone
happy. Even worse, you can't even make a majority of people happy. If you assume GNOME or KDE are available, you're assuming you're running on Linux.
That dependency is just for some sort of a configuration/helper tool. It should not be a key component, i.e. sane defaults should be enough to get it up and running. Besides, the configuration tool can have graphical and text mode front ends, compiled separately. Many RedHat/Fedora configuration tools are done that way.
Why not use Motif/Lesstif? Sure, it's ugly, but I like it, it's available with most major distributions, exists on non-Linux targets, and a precompiled binary of OpenMotif is provided with Sun Java 1.5/Linux
Then there's the question "OpenMotif or Lesstif, hmm...", which is answered by ./configure, and I say defult to Lesstif on Linux binaries, Motif on solaris.
I'd still say that Qt is easiest to use. Trolltech went as far as having the open source Qt/Windows installer optionally download and install the MinGW compiler, and then run the build process for you. Of course, since it's GPL, anyone is free to post the binaries as well.
Besides, who said that the configuration tool has be compiled for Windows?! It only needs to be run in whatever environment wine is running in. That means unixen for now, and I bet that anything that wine runs on, Qt runs on too.
Cheers, Kuba