[lostwages] Remove winetools from download page

Dominic Wise dominic.wise at ukonline.co.uk
Thu Dec 22 20:27:35 CST 2005


On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 09:43 +0100, wino at piments.com wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 02:59:57 +0100, Tom Wickline <twickline at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
> 
> > On 12/21/05, James Hawkins <truiken at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> As much as I appreciate the work you, Joachim, and others have put
> >> into winetools, we're getting closer to the point in time when
> >> winetools needs to be phased out by a better, more functional wine.
> 
> Getting closer, sure, but it's not for tommorow

As someone coming from a Windows (professionally at least, Linux at
home) background I have to say that making it harder to install programs
by dropping the link to winetools, given the known, current limitations
of Wine, could completely undo all of the efforts of the last 10 years. 

One thing to remember is that 'Windows users are stupid'. Of course, I
don't mean that literally; rather, anyone considering a switch to Linux
is going to want to see some hard proof that their Windows programs
might work. If they just get a crash (or a 'go to irc at etc....') they
will give up immediately. I have seen some very sensible comments
suggesting that once  Wine reaches 1.0 then THAT is the time to drop
references to winetools.      


> >> Part of this process is removing it from the official download page.
> 
> Part of this process "will be" removing winetool link. "is" implies the  
> present and we are not at this stage with wine yet.
> 

Agreed

> >
> > 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.

I agree completely


> >
> I agree, I think there has to be an easy start method with at least half a  
> chance of getting things running.
> 
> Most new users , many probably new to linux as well will NOT even be aware  
> of what an IRC channel is an probably never met a maiing list either.
> 
> It seems some of the ppl posting on this thread dont even realise that  
> they are living on a different plane to those actually using wine.
> 
> If new users cant get some positive result quickly they will just conclude  
> that wine is unusable, and from an average user point , they would be  
> right.
> 
See above

> If they can be hooked by getting somethings to work they _may just_ go a  
> bit further with some things that dont. Hell , they may even read the doc  
> if they can find it.
> As for argueing that bugs wont get reported. I was not aware that there  
> was a shortage of things to do in fixing Wine.
> ing 'please look here 
> 
> If Wine scares off new users by expecting everyone to be a software  
> developer it will fail in it's primary role of helping users to migrate to  
> Linux.
Could not agree more. Wine needs to 'get it right for the users ', even
if that involves occasionally saying 'please look here; we like you and
we want to keep you here'.  

Fixing bugs is the devs job, not the end user's job, yes?

> 
> regards.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 




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