wine configuration via the registry and such

[Ray]

Hi,

I'm Ray, and I am a wine addict. ;)

Seeing how a big step is made, I thought I'd drop a line concerning the "new
way" to configure wine.

First off, it's great to have some GUI to setup wine, though the config file was
kind of handy and simple to use. There had to be changes with the winecfg tool
though. But seeing how the configuration now is plainy stuffed into the "normal"
registry, and how the important keys are simply get mixed up with other stuff
makes me wonder if it could be done otherwise. I also wondered why exactly the
registry is used for wine configuration and not a single config file? Winecfg
could store the exactly same settings in the config file, too. Of course, on one
hand to be as much "windows-ish" as possible, the registry seems to be the way,
on the other hand, since wine comes from the linux side, I cannot really see
some argument against ONE SINGLE easy-to-handle config file.
> From the aspect of a GUI usage, I can't think of an real difference between

both, except where the settings are stored. 
I might miss something else as well, though.

But secondly, the winecfg tool is basically not usable for a basic setup or the
switch from config file to the registry (yet). In other words, I based my
configuration on the Sidenet-configuration-tool once and simply can't be
bothered to hack all those DLL settings in via the GUI. And this everytime I
have to reconfigure or setup (a new) wine. And there are more settings than just
the DLL ones. Of course, once the basic configuration is done, one could use the
registry editor to export a couple .reg files for later reimports. Basically it
is what I do/did, I just "patched" the Sidenet-1.8.2-script to import .reg
files, of course shortly before 1.8.3 came out ;*
So I now ended up in doing it the .INF-file way .. it appears to be the best one
for script based setup, too. But using simply and ONLY winecfg for setting wine
up is hardly practicable if you have an existing configuration to implement.

Editing the .reg files in an editor is somewhat strange since all the
registrykeys are re-arranged every time wine is started, that means a lot of
searching, especially if software has been installed. 
It also appears there is no coherent block of wine configuration settings, which
was some kind of advance for the config file. Another advance was the ability to
comment things out in the config file, if you do it the same way in the .reg
file it gets deleted with the next wine start.

A possible solution is not to comment the whole line out, but change the key's
name (e.g. "comctl32"="native" => ";comctl32"="native"). But that again causes
the key to be re-arranged and you have to find it again. Granted, using this
example it is just moved up to the beginning of the section, plus you can see
all the "commented" keys at once.. on the other hand, I don't really know what
happens with those keys, since they are not really taken out of the
configuration. And it's not very handy to delete and recreate those entries via
winecfg in case of error/bug search or whatever. There is an option "disable" on
the libraries tab, but it seems to completely disable the use of a DLL. (Err..
just like it says ^^)

Speaking of comments, there is also no possibility to comment sections in the
configuration anymore, which make it difficult to always remember why a setting
has been made, what are there for options etc. This is not good, and even more
if the whole configuration stuff is not arranged using my (the users)
order/system but wine's :~

I think some im- and export interface for settings in the winecfg tool could be
useful. (Using Sidenet seems to be useful, too, but .. I don't think it'd be too
much of a redundance :D)
Maybe there also should be some kind of description/comment lines available in
the GUI. And I think it would be nice to have a way to disable a setting (read:
comment out), mostly and especially on the libraries tab.

And what I would like to see is some extra .reg file like "wine.reg" where all
(real) wine related stuff is stored. This way one can simply transfer wine
settings from one wine instance to another without having any worries about
accidently catching some keys made by other software. "Native" editing would be
much more simpler, too. Another advantage would be that one can easily "reset" a
screwed configuration by restoring a backup of the file without the risk of
screwing registry entries of installed software.

And finally, there is the documentation issue. Many basic config file sections
and options are documented, but not all, most of them can be simply "converted"
to the registry ones, some of them are commented in the source but may lack of
documentation, some are just .. however, the point I am trying to make is, that
guessing things because they are undocumented is something from the windows
world I do not really want to be "emulated" with wine. ;D

-Rayston