MSCMS: new dll

Mike Hearn m.hearn at signal.QinetiQ.com
Tue Sep 21 04:05:00 CDT 2004


> ~30000 for the last 7 days. Yes, I'm surprised to see that, for example,
> the French translations of Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird score higher
> downloads than Wine. Maybe switch to bi-weekly releases, as Gaim?

I don't think it makes sense to compare ourselves to Mozilla, tempting 
though it is.

For one, those programs run on Windows and as such have a much larger 
userbase. For another, everybody these days uses a web browser and email 
client but many Linux users don't need Windows emulation.

No, I don't think bi-weekly releases makes sense. We may as well just 
tell people to use CVS. If anything we want to slow down and do more 
like 6 monthly releases.

> The primary mirror for the source releases is sf.

Don't forget ibiblio. That's where I always get mine from, and it's 
what's linked to in the official announcements. But yes, OK, we send a 
lot of traffic to SourceForge.

> I think we need to better advertise major build/usage changes in Wine.
> The change to dosdevices still brings a lot of questions in #winehq,
> mostly from people modifying their config and finding nothing changes in
> Wine. People still want to change version on the commandline, or set
> desktop, or use --debugmsgs.

I agree, our communication is not so great, but I don't know how to 
improve it :(

Remember that a lot of users don't read *anything*, they simply download 
an RPM or use apt/emerge/urpmi/... and start playing with it maybe 
following an ancient HOWTO. Where do we publish information of changes?

> Once in a while, I think a change which actually breaks things is good,
> as it forces people to learn the proper way to do something, and not
> rely on second-hand knowledge from 4 years ago. Of course letting the
> user know how to put it back together quickly is required :)

The config file changes could have been managed better, if only by 
shoving a comment at the top automatically saying that the drives had 
been migrated. It's clear from the number of people who actually advise 
others to use winecfg (!) that many don't read what's printed on stderr.

Actually I suspect some users are getting installs which simply send the 
output of Wine to /dev/null. I recall seeing at least one package that 
did this.



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