On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Zachary Goldberg zgold@bluesata.com wrote:
I agree with Canonical that perhaps it doesn't make sense to make a Winebuntu or a new Ubuntu with Wine as a bigger focus for exactly that reason, it doesn't work for everything and that isn't a great experience. (Anything thats inconsistent is bad for something like Ubuntu. We love Wine but fact is fact, it isn't univerally perfect so they can't advertise 'Full Windows Application Support!' etc. etc. They could advertise 'Will Work with Some Windows Apps!' but then users ask which ones and it gets confusing from there and yada yada...)
However perhaps it does make more sense to think about using Wine for application specific scenarios.
I believe it has been proposed before to have .debs for things like Adobe Photoshop which first install Wine (or create a new prefix etc.) and then ask for the Photoshop CD; sort of like application specific bundlings of Wine.
This has been the long term plan we've had with Bordeaux. We ultimately want to give the user the ablity to just do something along the lines of
sudo apt-get install photoshopcs
and have it find the correct version of Wine, if its missing install that deb, install the photoshopcs deb and then start the install process.
There are a few key pieces missing for this to work
well for the end user though.
1. Wine Prefix Management
Alexandre and I have discussed this a bit and it needs to be well thought out. I'm partial to having
something like
~/.wineprefixes for the private prefixes
and
/usr/local/wineprefixes for the global prefixes
Alexandre likes the idea of having a winelib tool that can do this, and I think thats a great idea. Unfortunately the tool I wrote is GTK+. Also I believe we might need to add some enhancements to libwines support for detecting and maintaining the wineprefix variable, perhaps adding a function for handling the prefixes folder. I've got something like this in the Bordeaux cellar manager.
Also when dealing with things like deb/rpm packages the prefix manager will need to know how to handle these.
2. Templates The ultimate goal is of course that it will just install out of the box with no dependencies, fonts or wine dlloverride tricks. This is of course not possible in every case and so we need to take this in to account.
3. We need some sort of tool like you said that prompts for a CD. Some sort of autorun.exe like tool. Ubuntu has been working on this so that a Wine CD is identified and offered to start the setup.exe or whatever. Its very generic and not very effective. We need a better way.
4. Most of the backend to support this is already in place. Now that my IE6 changes are in winetricks, I could TODAY create a ie6.deb package. Thanks to other users that have made winetricks steps in the appdb we could do this for a host of other packages.
5. Finally if Cannonical won't host the application debs directly we need to see if Scott will do it or have someone else host them.
Thanks Steven