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kekkoudesu edited this page Jul 11, 2023 · 11 revisions

Introduction

Many people have written front ends for wine that allow managing multiple wine bottles and let users contribute recipes for installing various applications.

It would be nice if the bottles managed by these front ends were interchangeable, so you could create a bottle with one front end, and see it in the list of bottles of another front end (and launch its app from either).

It would also be nice if the user-contributed recipes were interchangeable, e.g. if you could use a recipe written for one front end with other front ends. We could then have a global repository of recipes which would grow much faster than the isolated recipe repository for any individual front end.

And what the heck, it would be nice if menu items for the apps disappeared properly when you delete the bottle. (That probably just requires creating symlinks from ~/.local/applications/foo into ~/.local/share/wine/foo/xdgmenu or something like that; the devil is in the details.)

Directories

Cleaning up a prefix

It is our hope that acceptable removal of a prefix should be as simple as deleting the prefix -- this means, for instance, that menu items disappear and front ends "know" that the prefix and its associated apps are gone.

TODO: this is a bit tricky implementation. Steps:

  • winemenubuilder should make symlinks in ~/.local/applications rather than .desktop files. The .desktop files can then reside in the prefix; when they're deleted, the links should become broken and thus not show
  • winemenubuilder (or other tools, eg front ends or computer janitor) can clean out these broken links
  • desktop environments need to be double checked that they do the right thing (nothing) when they encounter these links -- these would be normal bugs

Unresolved issues

Software Center would like to be able to list and remove Wine prefixes, but to do this it needs to know "the purpose" of each one. This generally means a specific app, however it's quite possible for a given prefix to have more than one program installed. We'll need some sort of way of indicating this (perhaps new metadata?)

Recipes (verbs)

Recipes (also called verbs) are bourne shell scripts that are sourced by the front end. They may call functions defined by the front end; all such functions are lowercase and start with w_. They may read variables defined by the front end; all such variables are uppercase, and most start with W_. The winetricks environment variable WINE and the standard Wine variable WINEPREFIX are obeyed.

Each recipe consists of metadata followed by a function.

The metadata looks like this: w_metadata verbname category \ key=value \ key=value \ ...

where legal categories are 'apps' or 'games' at the moment.

e.g. w_metadata wog games \ title="World of Goo Demo" \ publisher="2D Boy" \ year="2008" \ media="download" \ file1="WorldOfGooDemo.1.0.exe"

A simple function looks like this:

load_bioshock_demo() {
    w_download http://us.download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/demos/nzd_BioShockPC.zip 7a19186602cec5210e4505b58965e8c04945b3cf
    w_try_cd "$W_TEMP" w_try unzip -q "$W_CACHE/$W_PACKAGE"/nzd_BioShockPC.zip
    w_try_cd "BioShock PC Demo" w_try wine setup.exe
}

Contributing to Winetricks

If you want to add a new verb, see Adding A New Verb.

Supported metadata

For the moment, the list of supported metadata elements is kept short on purpose. More will be added when needed.

Label Usage
file1 file to check in cache to see if installer is cached
media download or dvd (or not set, if not an installable item)
publisher company releasing the app, e.g. "Electronic Arts", "Activision", or "Adobe" * title - name of app (ideally same as name in wine appdb and gamerankings.com)
year year app was released for PC
wineversion version of wine known to work (optional), e.g. 2.0.1.

The 'wineversion' metadata should be familiar to PlayOnLinux scripters. Other front ends may choose to ignore this field (e.g. wisotool will ignore it because wisotool is partly aimed at Wine developers, who always want to use the one they just built).

Predefined Variables

Recipes can rely on the following variables being set before they are executed:

Variable Usage
LANG used when outputting localized messages. If not set, use English.
WINE if this isn't set by the user, the framework sets it to output of which wine
WINEPREFIX if this isn't set by the user, the framework sets it to ~/.wine
USERNAME the user running winetricks
W_APPDATA_UNIX Unix path to user's Application Data folder
W_APPDATA_WIN Windows path to user's Application Data folder
W_CACHE a Unix path to the directory where downloaded files are cached.
W_CACHE_WIN a Windows path version of W_CACHE
W_DRIVE_C a Unix path to the C:\ directory
W_ISO_MOUNT_ROOT the Unix path to where the install disc is mounted
W_ISO_MOUNT_LETTER the drive letter the install disc is mounted on
W_KEY the key for this package (set by w_read_key)
W_OPT_UNATTENDED if 1, install app without asking any questions
W_PACKAGE the code for the currently executing recipe. e.g. this is set to bioshock_demo before calling load_bioshock_demo.
W_PROGRAMS_DRIVE drive letter the standard Program Files directory is on
W_PROGRAMS_UNIX Unix path to standard Programs Files directory
W_PROGRAMS_WIN Windows path to standard Programs Files directory
W_PROGRAMS_X86_UNIX Unix path to standard 32 bit Programs Files directory
W_PROGRAMS_X86_WIN Windows path to standard 32 bit Programs Files directory
W_TMP a Unix path to a directory which exists and is empty when the function starts, and is deleted when the function exits. This is where to unpack .zip files, etc.
W_TMP_WIN same as W_TMP, but as a Windows path

Predefined Functions

Recipes may call any of the following shell functions:

Function Usage
w_ahk_do execute an Autohotkey script
w_die abort with an error message
w_download takes an appid, a URL and an sha1sum, downloads the given file to the directory $W_CACHE/$appid
w_download_manual takes an appid, a URL, a filename, and an sha1sum, and asks the user to download a file from the given page
w_metadata called before verb is defined to add it to the list of verbs
w_mount takes a volume name; mounts the given volume (either from a disc or an iso)
w_pathconv convert between unix and windows paths (fixme: split into two functions)
w_read_key prompt the user for a disc key (or read a cached one)
w_try executes the following command, possibly with logging, and aborts nicely if the command fails
w_try_regedit run regedit, abort on failure
w_try_winetricks run winetricks, abort on failure
w_verify_sha256sum verify the checksum of a single file, die if mismatch
w_warn display nice warning. If GUI mode, waits for user to confirm.
w_workaround_wine_bug checks whether given wine bug should be worked around.
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