Hi Owen,
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Owen Rudge owen@owenrudge.net wrote: <snip>
interested in working on some other applets, such as an Add/Remove Programs applet, or a Multimedia applet. Obviously, there wouldn't necessarily be time to implement all of these, so my intention would be to get the main control panel and basic Wine control panel applets from winecfg working well first, and then look at other applets that could be implemented.
I've developed applications and, indeed, Control Panel applets for Windows for many years now (I started programming using the Windows API when I was 12!), so I feel confident that this is a task I would be able to handle. I believe that a good configuration interface for Wine that supports third-party control panels is something that would be very useful for end-users.
If anyone has any comments or suggestions regarding my proposal, I'd very much appreciate any feedback.
I don't really know if we want to just focus on applets or if we should not aim for having this project provide better integration with the native desktop. As far as I understand there is some infrastructure work that will need to be done in shell32 as I don't think we fully implement the entire Control Panel shellname space. I expect implementing this properly will take a good bit of time. What would be cool would be if we fully supported the namespace so that when you called control.exe it loaded the control panel window and that could be embedded in a GTK or QT window for use by native applications. There was a patch floating around on wine-patches a few months back to allow for embedding a Win32 Wine window inside of an existing X window that should do the trick.
As far as migration of the stuff in winecfg and other programs go, I think starting with the Add/Remove applet is a good. I don't think it would be too hard to take all of the current logic in wine/programs/uninstall and wrap it in a proper applet. We want to make sure that we don't introduce any sort of regression when we make the switch over so reusing that code would be a good place to start.
So to recap, (this just goes for for me) I think the project should be laid out as follows
1. A fully working Control Panel Namespace 2. The ability to embed the Control Panel window in a native window 3. Have a collection of applets to configure wine
I don't know who is mentoring this project so I think we should get their thoughts on it.
Thanks