A layer based setup for winetricks recipes
Wine is used to run windows programs on linux. The runtime works by re-implementing dlls to be linux compatible. However software doesn't just need the base libraries, there are dependencies that need to be installed for every piece of software.
Wine supports different windows versions...(all of them?), therefore it is necessary to use different environments to ensure compatibility between software and windows versions.
Some dependencies might also be incompatible with each other, therefore the usage of wine prefixes. Using wine prefixes means that usually every application has its own environment, (like containers), which means that all dependencies have to be reinstalled for every new program. You don't have too, different programs can share the same environment, but as stated, problems difficult to debug might arise.
Winetricks automates the installation of dependencies (like .NET and DirectX packages), yet, even if scripted, setups can still take quite some time.
Proposal
Ostree is used to checkout versions of operative systems. And even though its main use case is to enable atomic upgrades for OSes installed on bare-metal, it could be used to build wine prefixes with preinstalled collections of dependencies, like flatpak uses the same method to share runtimes between different applications, effectively there could be different flatpak wine runtimes for families of software that share the bulk of the dependencies; the only question left is if there are any license problems distributing such kind of runtimes with what would effectively be preinstalled windows software. :S
