Wine User Guide changes (RFC)

[Mike Hearn]

Brian Vincent wrote:
> With Mike's recent Winecfg patches and the renewed hope we'll cut over
> to using Winecfg some day, I went through and began updating the Wine User
> Guide.  The focus of the changes thus far was to remove references to the
> config file and discuss Winecfg instead.  Without actually being able to
> use Winecfg these changes are useless, but it's probably worth looking
> this over to see whether these docs are headed in the right direction.

If you apply all the patches I sent in sequence, you should be able to 
use it. It won't have any effect on Wine but you can edit the 
configuration, save it, restart winecfg and it'll all be there. Also the 
UI has changed a fair bit, so I'd recommend trying out CVS+patches to 
see what's changed.

> For now, the biggest changes can be found in configuring.sgml  (which
> translates into the "Configuring Wine" part of the guide.)  A diff is
> available here:
> 
>  http://www.theshell.com/~vinn/wine-user-guide.diff

Yep, this is looking good, though the patches remove usage of treeviews 
so the in depth stuff needs to be updated.

It might also be worth compiling this as a help file, when our winhelp 
implementation is mature enough.

> (Not having looked at Mike's recent patches, I'm sure this will soon be out
> of date.  Things like drive detection are missing.  

Drive detection is easy. You just hit "autodetect" in the drives tab and 
away it goes.

> There's also parts that
> I left undone: such as the printing config, 

Right. At the moment there is no UI for configuring printing, as my 
understanding is that if you use CUPs it should be automagical.

> an appendix listing reg keys would
> be nice once we know what they all are.  Other parts probably need a
> better explanation, such as font configuration.  Anything you notice missing
> is probably worth telling me about, though it won't be hard to find lots of
> mistakes.)

No font configuration UI yet. Should probably have one.

The audio tab is destined for destruction. We need to move driver 
detection into each driver and make it automatic.

> One of the big goals of all this is to reduce the amount of documentation
> and outdated stuff.  Therefore, registry.sgml, printing.sgml, and fonts.sgml
> have been somewhat merged into configuring.sgml.  fonts.sgml contained a
> lot of outdated info in it that probably caused more confusion than helped.

Yes, true, though for people without modern systems it may still be 
helpful (not sure).

> Going forward, we have a lot of documentation in the User Guide about
> downloading Wine, compiling Wine, CVS, etc; mostly stuff that's already
> duplicated in some form or another on the web site.  I'd like to see as
> much stuff like that removed from the User Guide as possible, we can
> simply refer people to WineHQ for more info.  (I think the reason for the
> duplication is that the website docs simply didn't exist when the User 
> Guide was written, now the website has superceded the User Guide.)
> When it's all said and done we should be left with the following sections:
>  - Introduction
>  - Configuration
>  - Running
>  - Troubleshooting
> 
> At least, that's the direction I think it should go and at some point
> I could begin making those changes.  Anyone disagree?  Any thoughts,
> comments, concerns, criticisms?

Sounds good to me! The smaller the user guide can be the better job 
we're doing IMHO.

thanks -mike