Where wine writes?

[etwineb]

I'd like to know where wine writes.
I am not speaking about applications wine executes, they can obviously write everywhere the user privileges allows (via z:/), but of wine itself.

I saw that even using WINEPREFIX wine writes in ~/.local, sometime it leaves .desktop files around.

Why is that? When wine writes exactly?
Can I force wine keeping everything it needs in its WINEPREFIX folder?

(reason: I made few packages of windows applications, they should work most possibly as linux native ones)

thanks, a RTM answer is fine if you point me in the right direction.

[vitamin]

I'd like to know where wine writes.

Into $WINEPREFIX if it's registry or "fake c:" drive. And potentially anywhere you (as user) have access to.

I saw that even using WINEPREFIX wine writes in ~/.local, sometime it leaves .desktop files around.

Yes that's the standard place for menu links, menu sctracture descriptors and icons. See standard for more details: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedi ... atest.html

Can I force wine keeping everything it needs in its WINEPREFIX folder?

No you can't. Window managers don't know to look inside $WINEPREFIX for menu entries, icons, etc.

[etwineb]

Well, if wine follows the XDG specifications I can change the directories just altering the $XDG_* environment variables. Is that so?

Edit: I just tried. It works fine. Using:
XDG_DATA_HOME=/dev/null wine installer.exe
installs without messing up the system.

Thanks.