Please read: Wine(HQ) needs a reorganization (AppDB, Bugzilla, etc.)

[S. Schauenburg]

On IRC we started a chat on #WineHQ and discussed how to improve Wine.
There were comments made and I wanted to summarize them and ask for
your opinion.
By the way: Who is in charge of WineHQ, AppDB etc.? A list of people
who are responsible for that would be nice (it could be I've missed
that one though).

Back onto the main topic. Remarks made:
1. AppDB needs a revamp. Maybe drop the maintainers (those things just
need to be set by developers only). Just have a look at the activity
of all the maintainers in the last year. **Read on for suggestions to
drop the AppDB.

2. Create a Wine forum. This solves the problem of users asking the
same questions over and over again. Here also the "comments" of the
AppDB could be centralized (because most of them aren't really
comments)

3. With a forum in place, the user-mailing list could be dropped and
maybe also even the devel-mailing list.

4. Create a Wine Wiki, instead of the AppDB. Only certain developers
(or maybe users) can set/edit certain pages. Then also howto's could
be inserted here.

5. It's too difficult for users to add a bugreport. Either create a
small program/app which does it for the user (like "Submit this
bugreport" *click*) and you're done. The other option is to create a
simplified method for searching and inserting a bug report, because
from a users view, there are too many options. (and probably the user
wouldn't even know what to click on. Don't forget to give the users
the option to 'add' a file with certain 'debug channels' (which ones?
only +seh?)

6. Users need to know that if they submit a bug report (when it's
simplified) that it actually HELPS you, the developers. So it's "Help
us, help you".

What's your opinion about this? In my eyes, it would greatly improve
the user input/feedback and would even make Wine more popular.

Regards,



SWAT