[lostwages] Remove winetools from download page

[James Hawkins]

On 12/21/05, Tom Wickline <twickline at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Shouldn't Wine be fixed before it's removed? Isn't it kind of backwards to say
> we need to have Wine run everything out of the box and to accomplish this were
> going to remove a link to a user friendly tool that currently helps our users.
>

If users continue to use winetools, wine won't get the needed testing
coverage that will really help boost the development process.  Many
bugs will go unnoticed, new features won't be tested, and we won't get
the feedback to make wine better.  That's the beauty of open source;
users are encouraged to tell us every bug or missing feature, and we
will do our best to address the issues.  The more eyes on wine, the
better.

> Then what? your going to have just as many, if not even more people on
> IRC asking for
> help who other wise wouldn't have had to do so.
>

I would love to see that day.  I have no problem with people asking
for help with wine on wine-users or IRC.  The problem is when people
report problems that are winetool specific, as Vitaliy initially
stated.  That's one of the reasons why I advocate a winetools specific
mailing list, so people using winetools can reach the people that work
on winetools.

>
> Wine is easy for me, and I'm sure for yourself  to use and configure
> but this is just not the case for a large number of people!
>

Usability is another rapidly progressing area of wine.  You are
exactly right in that it is easy for us to use, so we can't see
through the eyes of a new wine user.  We need more people to try wine
out and tell us exactly what are is too difficult or not intuitive to
use.  That way we can fix it and make it easier for potentially many
more users.  If that user had used winetools, we would never get the
report, and the issue would still remain.

>
> Removing WineTools is the worst thing this project could do at this time, as
> its the *only* free GUI that makes a genuine attempt to help first
> time users.

On the contrary, winecfg is a great tool aimed to ease the use of wine
and is being actively developed.  Keep in mind that we don't want to
remove winetools, just phase out winetools by advancing wine itself,
and avoid promoting it from winehq.  This should be taken in no way as
an insult to winetools developers or users.  The winetools developers
are very competent, and their work is appreciated.  winetools will
eventually no longer be needed (which is a good thing!), and this is
one of the first steps towards that process and wine 1.0.

--
James Hawkins