I’m in the process of changing Wineskin around… its still basically going to be the same app it is now, but it needs to be better in many ways.

My first plan is to open source Wineskin under a LGPL license.  This will allow more use of it by people, including custom modifications if needed.

My second plan is to re-write the entire thing using bash scripts.  The C++ is just not good enough, as most of what it does is have to mess with other programs, so it just has too many system() calls in it.  I’ve re-written the main Wineskin app already, optimized the code a lot, and handling the X server slightly different… and it already launches about 3 or 4 times faster than before.  This will help ports feel more native, when they open in just a few seconds.  Bash will also let it be easily run without modification on currently unsupported Mac OS X 10.4 (intel) machines.

My third plan, is building the Wine.bundles so that it can run on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6, so that Wineskin will support all 3 Intel versions of OSX.

My fourth plan… taking the idea from devilhunter, after we worked on CXZ, I’ve decided to make 2 versions of Wineskin.  There will be normal “Wineskin” and “Wineskin Lite”

Wineskin will stay the same way… fully self contained

Wineskin Lite will be like CXZ, it will have an engine library that needs to be installed on the machine.  All of the Xquartz and Wine in Wineskin will be in the main library.  Wrappers will be “lite” as in ~130mb smaller, and the engine files aren’t reproduced for every wrapper. Wineskin Lite wrappers will have to list their required Wineskin Lite Engine that needs to be installed on the machine in order to work.  Wineskin Lite Engine installers will be made available to easily install any needed version on a machine.  It will not interfere in any way with CXZ, both may be used and installed.

Anyone have any suggestions or comments?  Please let me know…