[cw-discuss] installations

[Jeremy White]

> Why does it not use the default bottle? Or at least duplicate its 
> settings... Which in my case AFAICT is a Win 98 bottle.
> 
> May be picking a nit that does not bother anyone else, but as a beta 
> tester for an unsupported app (Forte Agent) I frequently install new 
> builds on top of my existing install. And it is mildly annoying to have 
> to change this setting every time.

The honest truth is that the entire concept and use of bottles is
something that we are still evolving.

The original desire for bottles was that 'most' users would never
know about them - we would just automatically route the supported
software to the right bottles, and everything would be fine.

I think reality is sinking in - I suspect we have very few customers
who only use CrossOver to run applications on the officially
supported list, and so bottles are coming in to play for everyone.

The further design concept of bottles is that when you are
installing an unsupported application, the very best thing we
can do for you is isolate that new application into a separate
environment.  Thus, if something goes horribly wrong, with a
single stroke, you've wiped it out.  If we routed things into
the default bottle, then you might find your perfectly good
installation of MS Office corrupted by FooBar 2000.

The reason that we default to a Windows 2000 bottle is that,
right now, that is the place where it is 'best' to get an application
working.  It is the default for Wine, and so it is the most tested
(and also most future proof) path for a random application.

Now there are still a number of applications - MS Office and Quicken
in particular - that run best in Windows 98 bottles.  That has long
been the only way to run them, and is the tested path, and we use
the COM implementation that comes on those CDs in that case.
(Someday we hope to have them running in Windows 2000 bottles,
but that day is not yet here :-/)

Hence, our installer recommends putting them into a Windows 98 bottle;
I'm trying to persuade folks that they should follow our advice,
rather than assuming that a later version would
automatically be 'better'.

Cheers,

Jeremy