Why isn't everyone compiling wine

[Ivan Leo Murray-Smith]

> I'm not running 
> gentoo - but wine isn't a stable product yet and I think you should grip 
> every stability there where you could get it - shouldn't the winehq site 
> *recommend* custom compiling? It's all automated so everyone should be 
> able to do this...
I doubt you'll get any extra stability compiling from source, as long so your
using the correct binary for your system.
Back when everybody compiled, a considerable percentage of the support requests
where caused by people compiling without some optional headers, for example the
cups headers aren't usually installed, so lots of people said wine didn't print,
and we had to tell them to install the cups headers. Wine has a lot of optional
libs, cups, ICU, openGL, ssh, artsd, alsa and so on, it's quite a long list, and
the fact that now most people use binaries that have support for all these libs
saves a lot of time. Also, compiling wine, actually compiling anything, isn't
user friendly. Imagine a winxp user that installs linux, then wants to try wine,
spends hours getting all the minimal dependencies installed (gcc, make
&friends), then he can't print nor play 3d games, and we tell him to go to
http://bla and get header X, and then to http://blabla and get header Y, then he
gets the wrong version, and starts asking what a header is, and so on. The next
day that user will throw his linux CDs away with the remains of the launch. Wine
needs usability, wine can now create the .wine directory itself, so, if you want
to run an app that works on wine, you just install the RPM in a few seconds
(Compiling can take various hours on a old PC), click on the app, and it just
works. This means that more users can use wine, without being computer geeks,
and that also means more feedback, and consequentially more motivation for
developers (If a developer is trying to get a game working, he'll feel more
motivated if he knows dozens of people are waiting for that game to work on
wine). Also, if something goes wrong when building, it will take lots of
learning, and lots of time to fix, if the user is new to these sort of things.
And the user may not care about debugging wine, in most cases he want it to
install and run quickly and easily.
So, for all these reasons, the users that don't want to waste time and want to
just try wine and see if/how it works, binaries are the best option. And anybody
wanting to do something more advanced (Debugging, cvs regression testing and so
on) will build from source, possibly downloading from CVS.

Ivan.