[Wine] How can we improve WINE?

[James McKenzie]

Austin English wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 2:17 PM, James Mckenzie
> <jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>   
>>> Make a bridge between appdb and wine, so that when a certain app crashes, an howto could be
>>> displayed, and/or a link to the appdb page is provided.
>>>       
>> This is a good thought, but what happens when the application is not in the AppDB?  Users are trying to use new programs all the time.  Should we allow them to create a new entry and provide input?  These are items for discussion.
>>     
>
> It's been discussed quite a bit on both wine-users and wine-devel. The
> consensus was it's very hard to detect what program it is, e.g., even
> for many common programs you have different versions/languages/etc. Do
> you bundle the information with Wine? If so, it gets outdated quickly.
> If you don't, what happens when a user doesn't have an internet
> connection?
>   
That, my friend, is the user's loss.  I don't report every crash for
Thunderbird/Mac because I believe (rightfully so) that the bug is with
my Mac and not Thunderbird.   We can provide the ability to send in
reports to Bugzilla, and even provide appropriate information, but we
cannot force users to utilize this method.
> Looking up the information on AppDB isn't THAT hard, and developers
> time is better spent fixing bugs rather than making an appdb bridge.
>   
This may be considered a shortcoming of Wine.   However, you are correct
in the fact that we need to concentrate on fixing the bugs that already
exist.  I was looking for a simple "me too" without having to go through
the interface that Bugzilla provides and how hard it is to use by
newcomers. The idea is to reduce the number of duplicates without
presenting an interface like the APAR one used by IBM (it is horrible.)

James McKenzie