2008/12/22 Roderick Colenbrander <thunderbird2k@gmx.net>

Basically microsoft ships its own 'appdb' which contains the windows version an app wants to see and in general much, much more things. For instance their appdb allows windows to override the return values of functions, it can fake the presence of certain files/directories/registry keys, it can perform memory hacks and so on.

Something like that, not necessarily as a core part of wine but a
side project in the manner of winetricks, might actually be a good
idea from a user's point of view.

A wine app launcher that maintains a list of known applications
and the compatibility tweaks that are required in order to get them
to run, or at least offer sensible advice (eg, where an app requires
a native dll that is missing in order to work correctly). Its database
would, I guess, be against app name and wine version, and then
as wine improved it would need to do less and less.

--
Chris