> It is unfortunate that it has to be outside of the WINEPREFIX, but there's no way around it
There is a way around unwanted and unexpected associations though: make the integration opt-in instead of opt-out and/or filter associations that the user is unlikely to ever want (like standard file types that will almost certainly already be handled outside Wine). Wine's Internet Explorer is there for compatibilty with Windows programs that expect IE, exposing it outside the Wine environment does not make any sense.
Since I use multiple prefixes, including temporary ones, editing registry in each one of them is not an option so I have my package manager set not to install winemenubuilder at all.
I believe another approach is to edit the default registry settings in /usr/share/wine/wine.inf so that new prefixes have the desired setting. Of course, then when updating the package it has to be reconciled. But it does have the advantage of being able to allow e.g. the settings that would only produce launcher icons and not file associations. There's another method using environment variables too, though I think that one basically works the same as removing the package entirely and can't be used to customize the behavior.
I kind of agree with you that the defaults are not great, or at least if things haven't changed. We could always see if maybe they'll accept patches to filter out more stuff by default.
There is a way around unwanted and unexpected associations though: make the integration opt-in instead of opt-out and/or filter associations that the user is unlikely to ever want (like standard file types that will almost certainly already be handled outside Wine). Wine's Internet Explorer is there for compatibilty with Windows programs that expect IE, exposing it outside the Wine environment does not make any sense.
Since I use multiple prefixes, including temporary ones, editing registry in each one of them is not an option so I have my package manager set not to install winemenubuilder at all.