docu update

[Mike Hearn]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 17:05:49 -0700, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Maybe Linux users in general know how to run configure (though I doubt
> that), but that's definitely not true for Wine users IMO; most of them
> come straight from Windows, and Wine is often the first time ever they
> build something from source.

I think the real issue here is not configure vs wineinstall, it's "why are
these users building Wine from the source at all?". They are not
developers, so therefore the answer must be either:

a) There is no binary package for their distribution. How common is this?
I don't know but I've encountered a startling number of newbies that use
off-the-wall distros like Ark/College Linux etc.

b) There is but it's out of date or broken. This is worryingly common too
even in large distros, witness the frequently broken Gentoo Wine packages.
There are some slackpacks going around currently that (wrongly)
dynamically link against the X extension libraries causing them not to
work for many people. These people are often told to "build from the
source" or "build from CVS".

c) They are trying to run a program and it doesn't work either due to
traditional Wine bugs or distro breakage, so rather than wait for the next
release they decide to try CVS directly.


(a) and (b) can be solved by WineHQ providing its own distro-neutral, run
anywhere binary packages. This isn't hard as Wine is generally excellent
at running on different peoples machines from the same binaries - after
all, CodeWeavers need it. I think a nice installer for correctly built
distro-neutral binaries for Wine would go a long way towards cutting the
number of non-developers building from source down to zero.

autopackage would be ideal for this, but it's currently not at version 1.0
which should be factored into any evaluation of such installers. Also,
Wine has virtually no core dependencies so you wouldn't gain much (apart
from the various nice graphical frontends) over Loki Setup for Wine.

Has anybody investigated this? Does anybody want to? I can help with any
binary portability questions people have.

thanks -mike