May be a bad idea to have Winetools in the next SUSE release

[Jan Zerebecki]

Hi.

For Andreas Jaeger: I CCed you, because you said on
http://en.opensuse.org/Wishlist_Packages_that_are_already_there
that Winetools got included for the next SUSE release. I hope you
are the correct person to talk to or at least can forward this to
someone who is. The following might be usefull information for
you:

I think a quote from http://www.winehq.org/site/download somewhat
sums up the cencus on this list regarding Winetools: "WineTools
[is] only recommended if installation or operability of Windows
software failed on pure Wine. Since WineTools radically alters
your Wine configuration please do not report bugs in programs
with WineTools installed. Instead contact the author of WineTools
Joachim von Thadden."

Some other facts:

Winetools is only sporadically updated for new versions of Wine
(as http://www.von-thadden.de/Joachim/WineTools/ indicates; this
site also contains some warnings regarding the support status).

Winetools radically alters some vital Wine settings and thus
makes many other apps fail.

This leads to many users asking for help in #winehq on freenode.
But nobody there wants to support winetools and thus can only
suggest them to remove their .wine and redo it without winetools
(which usually makes it work).

Currently no Winetools developer works closely with the Wine
developers to correct problems of interaction between Winetools
and Wine.



IMHO it would be best to either not include Winetools in a
distribution or find a more active developer for it who is
willing to support Winetools and cooperate with Wine developers.
Or at least put up a big warning where it is read by a user that
installs Winetools through the distributions package management.



Jan