Release plans

Molle Bestefich molle.bestefich at gmail.com
Sat Oct 1 12:28:04 CDT 2005


On 10/1/05, Dan Kegel <daniel.r.kegel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/1/05, Molle Bestefich <molle.bestefich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 1.) Your web page is a little hard to read.
> >     Not sure why, maybe it's just that it's 5-guides-in-1 along with
> >     code samples that makes it hard to get a proper overview.
>
> Think it would help to break it up into multiple pages?
> I'm afraid that would just make it harder to follow.

Perhaps - the page does cover a lot of topics that are only loosely
related.  (Eg. they all fold under 'helping out', but other than that
has little in common..)

On the other hand, the page is not awfully large, so it might hurt
more than it helps.

I dunno.  That's why I didn't give any concrete suggestions, hehe. 
But if you insist, I'll try.  It'll probably be controversial,
remember that I'm totally newbie.

My first impression is that of the topics.  All of the topics are
rather long, which may be a necessity because the topics are
disparate, but I immediately just gave up on reading them and started
browsing the text instead.

Browsing the body text wasn't the easy way out that I had hoped for
either :-).  Maybe because the chapters are very close together (no
spacing above chapter headings), maybe because the code examples does
not clearly stand out as such (had they had a frame and a different
background color, my eyes would've skipped them in an instant).  But
most probably just because I didn't know what I was looking for, and
it all seemed kind of confusing.

Another thing that poked me in the eyes are the large amount of
hyperlinks on the page.  I immediately thought (when browsing the
text) that I'd never have the patience to go through all of those. 
Since they seemed important to understand what's going on, I sort of
gave up early.  Maybe it would help to structure all the wine related
pages "better"?  Perhaps group together pages that have correlation,
make sure they're categorized under the same topic, etc., so less
links from your page is needed..  Dunno, just an idea, I don't have an
overview of the situation at all.

Lastly, I'll reiterate my opinion that the tools the Wine project
depends upon are inferior from a user interface point of view. 
Bugzilla and CVS are probably superior in features to Trac and
Subversion, but Trac and SVN both win hands down when it comes to
usability.  The simple search page in Trac gives you a much lower
entry barrier for new people, as well does the
no-initialization-and-login-process-etc.-required checkout with 'svn
co <url> <dir>' compared to the 12-line CVS monstrosity you quote on
your page.

It might seem stupid to you developers, but I do believe that the
easier it is to use, the more people are going to use it.


> > 2.) The bugzilla engine that you refer to is hard to use.
>
> I admit it takes some time to get used to, but I don't think
> switching to something else is an option at the moment.

Why?
Seriously, seems like all the hard work has been done by everybody else.
There's a shake'n'bake conversion script, and the installation is a no brainer.
Setting things up takes half an hour.
Fitting it into the winehq web site design is probably more work, but
something a good web developer can overcome.  I'll volunteer if nobody
else knows HTML/CSS :-).

Has there been previous discussion?
If so, I'd appreciate a keyword or a pointer!

> > I've spent an hour staring at the search page before it struck me: I
> > have to put the string "Trillian" in the "Comments" field.
> >
> > That's just horrid for newbies.
>
> True!  I updated my page to lead newbies through searching
> for a particular app's bugs.   Have another look at
> http://kegel.com/wine/qa/#tools
> and let me know if it's any better now.

See, that's exactly what I'm talking about :-).
You've done a very good job, conveying in as few words as possible
exactly what the reader needs to do to make the Bugzilla work.

The problem is that the average reader is probably not going to take
the time.  (S)he's going to look at your page for 5 seconds, and
decide that any bug tracking system where the act of searching for an
entry containing 'trillian' requires first reading 10 lines of
introductory text and then pursuing a link called "Introduction to
using Bugzilla with Wine" is not worth their time.  Even the wording
in that last link is downright scary.  It's as if after reading the
introductory text to the search engine, there's a larger "Introductory
Document", and THEN you may be set to start experimenting with doing
freetext searches.  That's, hmm, overwhelming.

> > Another thing that would help the newbie experience is to, per
> > default, change the STATUS field to contain all color and flavors.
>
> Agreed.  That's worth considering.  (Any Bugzilla administrators want
> to comment?)

I hope!

<shameless plug>
Note that Trac has a google-ish Search page (1 box, although it does
support various keywords for advanced stuff) and an entirely different
page for doing queries against the database?  ;-).
</shameless plug ends>

Hrm, and last, I'd like to apologize for all the complaining that I
do!  Sorry...



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