Interface for working directories/launchers

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

Wine currently creates launchers (.desktop files) with an Exec line like
this:

Exec=wine 'c:\games\supreme\supreme.exe'

But, some games expects to be run from its working directory. As working
directory typically doesn't matter to UNIX apps, some desktop environments
like GNOME don't let you set it. Really, this is a Wine specific issue.

So I'm wondering how we should fix this. The most obvious is a way to tell
Wine to change the working directory to the path of the EXE file before
running it, but we can't introduce command line switches any more and an
environment variable for this doesn't make much sense.

My proposal is to have a new winelib app "winemenulauncher" which simply
takes the working directory, program and arguments, and runs the program
but switching current directory first, ie the menu entry would look like:

Exec=wine winemenulauncher c:\games\supreme supreme.exe

Hopefully this should let us fix the case of games like Dungeon Keeper
which actually crash when run from their install directory.

Does this sound sensible?

thanks -mike

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 06:14:09PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Exec=wine winemenulauncher c:\games\supreme supreme.exe
>
> Does this sound sensible?

Why not just:

Exec=winemenulauncher c:\games\supreme supreme.exe

[Mike Hearn]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004 16:03:13 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
> Why not just:
>
> Exec=winemenulauncher c:\games\supreme supreme.exe

Could be, but we already dump lots of programs into the path. The other
thing is that win32 launchers have "working directory" and "command": we
should reproduce them faithfully IMHO. So if command is just "supreme.exe"
then great, but if it's a full path then it would go in.

[Alexandre Julliard]

Mike Hearn  writes:
> My proposal is to have a new winelib app "winemenulauncher" which simply
> takes the working directory, program and arguments, and runs the program
> but switching current directory first, ie the menu entry would look like:
>
> Exec=wine winemenulauncher c:\games\supreme supreme.exe
>
> Hopefully this should let us fix the case of games like Dungeon Keeper
> which actually crash when run from their install directory.
>
> Does this sound sensible?

The right way is to use start.exe on the .lnk file.