Suggestions about the website of www.winehq.org

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 9:47 PM, <axel_xia at sohu.com> wrote:
> I am a Chinese user for Fedora and have be trying to use wine for very long
> time. Based on my experience in wine evaluation, may I provide my
> suggestions on wine development & prospect?

Yes, please!  But please don't cross-post.  Your question probably belongs on
wine-devel or wine-users.  cc'ing five different mailing lists is not
a good idea.

> 1) There are many many discussions in the internet about the Chinese font
> sets issue in wine (wine very very slow, or can not display Chinese
> correctly, & etc). However, most popular Linux distributions almost have no
> issues for Chinese character display nowadays, the Chinese version of $MS
> windows are perfectly compatible with Chinese character and even all the
> softwares for $MS windows use default $MS Chinese fonts without any issues.
> So, is that possible for wine/crossover to directly use/share Chinese fonts
> (even all fonts of different languages) in linux distributions?

As far as I know, the MS chinese fonts are copyrighted, and their
license terms do not permit redistribution.
(The "microsoft core fonts" were distributed under a very permissive
license, and
are more or less available on all linux systems, but they don't have
good chinese fonts.)
If you know of any legally downloadable chinese fonts, please let
me know and I'll at least add them to winetricks.

If you're saying that Linux already comes with great Chinese fonts,
and Wine isn't using them properly, then that sounds like a bug
we need to fix.  There are two bugs open right now for CJK fonts:
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13829 (fonts aren't found properly)
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16325 (fonts don't look good)
Perhaps you should file one for the slow fonts issue.

> 2) Is that possible to have someone from winehq.org to verify $MS software
> applicable in wine or not(at lease which .dll should be copy into
> ~./wine/.../system32)? I found thousands of $MS softwares are posted on
> AppDB in www.winehq.org but only checked by evaluators. So I wonder if
> possible for winehq.org people to validate these programs and even better to
> tell visitors step by step to run each software in wine. I think it is
> better to post the correct steps of $MS software emulation in AppDB because
> we need to rely on the offical website. It is harmful that users don't think
> AppDB is believable then less and less people will come to www.winehq.org
> for help day by day.

Sadly, we don't have enough manpower to keep appdb up to date
ourselves; we rely on volunteers.  Our goal is for there to be no steps
needed beyond running setup and starting the app, so that's
what Wine developers tend to spend their time on, and we
leave appdb updating to volunteers.  That said, it would be
helpful for somebody to make a pass over the popular apps
in the appdb and update the howtos, including converting ad hoc installation
steps into winetricks steps as appropriate.
Any volunteers?

> 3) Is that possible to open accounts in Forums of winehq website for common
> users? And also is that possible to have different forums in Chinese or in
> other languages established worldwide?

That's a good idea.
We can also link to any other Wine forums that already exist in
other languages; do you know of any in Chinese?

Thanks again for writing.  We've known for a long time that
we have some issues with Asian languages, but since most
of our developers are not fluent in Asian languages, we haven't
made much progress on it.  We rely on feedback like the messages
you've been sending lately.
- Dan