Entry tags:

ubuntu, wine

Wine should "embrace and extend" the Microsoft Installer format
I had a thought late at night, and decided to post my idea to the Wine mailing list.

What if we created a standard for passing some sort of wine-specific
metadata in an MSI file?  Windows would ignore it, but application
developers could use it to include some helpful Linux-specific Wine
instructions like what windows version to use, a custom .desktop file,
or even instructions to install into a completely independent Wine prefix.

This way, a single .msi file could be a true universal installer for
both Windows machines and Linux machines.  Moreover, there'd be less of
a need to create custom Wine packages for applications like Picassa
since a lot of that functionality would be abstracted into Wine itself.

Surprisingly, the idea wasn't that preposterous.  It'd take a bit of work to implement in Wine, and likely most Windows developers wouldn't use it at all for quite some time, but it still has promise as a way to make it much easier to port applications to Linux and give them a truly native feel.

There's an interesting difference between an approach like this and just creating a Linux package that either depends on or bundles Wine (like Picassa currently does): here, the Windows developer only needs to do it once (rather than per distribution).  Moreover, since Wine is a user-level application the program can easily be installed into a single user's home folder; this is something we still can't do with standard packages in Ubuntu.  Plausibly, the extension could also include hooks for installing the application system-wide if desired, however this would require some substantial work both upstream in Wine and within the Wine package itself.


Still, there could be a day where some Windows-installer building tool like InstallShield prompts the application developer "In order to make your program integrate better with Linux, please answer these 5 simple questions about how you'd like it to be used."  They'd then receive some basic questions about their preferred Windows version, Applications menu program group, and so on.  If porting were that easy, you can count on seeing far more software bridging the divide.

Now, we just need to make sure Wine can actually run the programs once they're installed...