Work to be done

In preparing this document, it became clear that there were still a range of action items to be done in Wine that would improve this packaging process. For lack of a better place, I record them here. This list is almost certain to be obsolete; check bugzilla for a better list.

  1. Remove duplication of code between winecfg and wineconf/wineinstall.

    Currently, winecfg duplicates all of the code contained in wineconf.

    Instead, wineconf should be improved to generate the new style config file, and then winecfg should rely on wineconf to generate the default configuration file.

    Similarly, there is functionality such as creating the default registry files that is now done by both winecfg and wineinstall.

    At this time, it seems like the right thing to do is to break up or parameterize wineinstall, so that it can be used for single function actions, and then have winecfg call those functions.

  2. Enhance winecfg to support W: drive generation.

    The best practices convention now seems to be to generate a set of drives from M: through W:. At this point, winecfg does not generate a default wine config file that follows these conventions. It should.

  3. Enhance Wine to allow more dynamic switching between the use of a real Windows partition and an empty one.

  4. Write a winelauncher utility application.

    Currently, Wine really requires a user to launch it from a command line, so that the user can look for error messages and warnings. However, eventually, we will want users to be able to launch Wine from a more friendly GUI launcher. The launcher should have the ability to allow the end user to turn on debugging messages and capture those traces for bug reporting purposes. Also, if we make it possible to switch between use of a Windows partition or not automatically, that option should be controlled here.

  5. Get Marcus's winesetup facilities into CVS

    Along the lines of the changes to winecfg, and the consolidation of wineconf and wineinstall, we should extract the good stuff from Marcus's winesetup script, and get it into CVS. Again, perhaps we should have a set of scripts that perform discrete functions, or maybe one script with parameters.

  6. Finish this document

    This document is pretty rough itself. Many hard things aren't addressed, and lots of stuff was missed.