[Fwd: WineTools is in need of some major house cleaning!]

Tue Jan 24 19:32:30 CST 2006

Am Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 09:20:56AM -0700 schrieb Vitaliy Margolen:
> How often do you guys check if a piece of software can be installed on
> Wine as-is? Without any additional configuration or native components?

With every major release.

> The point and click user have to know what they are clicking on, or not
> be presented with the bad choices. With the way it is _ALL_ new times
> visiting http://www.winehq.org/site/download have an impressions that
> winetools are the absolute requirement and download and install them.

I do not know whether this is true. Me myself never looked into the
third party section. I also do not see why anyone will think out of the
title "3rd Party Tools" that WineTools is an "absolute requirement".

> I can't tell how many times I had to tell the user to vipe their ~/.wine
> dir and start from scratch _not_ using winetools because what they want
> to run does not require anything that winetools install.
> 
> Also I don't see any post from you or Sven about these problems in the
> bugzilla. How do we know that there are any problems?
> 
> > With an amount of many thousand downloads a month, not calculating the
> > distribution inclusions of WineTools, I get almost the same number of
> > direct mails about problems with the software as are coming into the
> > list. And I get massive positive resonance from users who were for a
> > long time trying to get their stuff running with plain wine and are now
> > happy that it just works with WineTools.
> 
> Well yeah, you just riding on the back of Wine. As I mentioned before,

Thank you! Your are such a polite person. And you are reading so well.
I never stated that I get positive resonance for Wine. And I never
aimed to get the cheers for Wine. Think what you are posting!

> every single person visiting download page thinks that winetools are
> something mandatory.

And I don't see that as I mentioned.

> Can we see some of those responses? I really like too see what programs
> run and don't run with and without winetools. Also please redirect all
> those users to appDB. We need information there available for everyone to
> see, not in your e-mail box (no offence).

The questions I get are almost all about WineTools, not about crashing
programs. Most users of WineTools install only what they can with
WineTools as of a lack of skill on the command line. The ones that
really want to get a program running with what ever setup come to the
list.

> > I must admit, that there raise problems out of the fact, that the same
> > users are trying to install not WineTools-tested software with the setup
> > of WineTools and coming then to the list. And your are right that this
> > is an undebuggable situation. The only way around that is to smoothly
> > migrate WineTools to more and more builtin features as long as this does
> > not make the programs uninstallable or unusable.
> 
> There should be _no such software_. The winetools have to setup

Well, you will allow that there other opinions in the world, will you?

> environment in a such a way that it is unified! If you saying that all
> you did is tinkered with lots of stuff to get few applications to work,
> this in not good. Wine is not cedega designed to run games and games

You will not be able to force people to use wine for what *you* think
is right. It is good for what it is working for.

> only. That just proves my point that environment you have setup with
> winetools is less flexible and more restrictive then Wine itself.

I am sure it is. So it might only work for the few apps it is meant
for. And that is the only purpose.

> >> Betreff: WineTools is in need of some major house cleaning!
> >> Datum: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 03:31:43 -0500
> >> Von: Tom Wickline <twickline at gmail.com>
> >> An: wine-devel <wine-devel at winehq.org>
> 
> I first would like to ask you if this is the standard response time? If
> Wine changes something big that brakes Wine, how long will that take for
> you or Sven to fix winetools?

I had holidays and many things to do after returning home. And as we
are not commercial we do not have a "standard response time". We also
do not test every new version of Wine, because the stock of programs
supported by WineTools need some time to test. So as Cedega or
CrossOver do we stick on a version with our setup for a while.

> >> 
> >> Hello Everyone,
> >> 
> >> Anyone who reads the posting on this list already knows that I stood up for
> >> the wineTools project and almost made a couple enemies... But me and Vitaliy
> >> came to a half way agreement on whether or not we should keep the link
> >> on our downloads page to WineTools....
> >> 
> >> I feel I need to ask a couple questions here about the future of WineTools.
> >> 
> >> 1) Are the concerns that Vitaliy brought up being looked into?
> 
> > Sven Paschukat suggested to implement a mode for WineTools to install
> > without native components and without that tampering in the registry.
> > This allows automatic installations *and* insight for developers if
> > something goes wrong. We can also add a debugging mode to enable the
> > logging of wines debug channels, to make a mailable report of bugs.
> > Also the other suggested corrections will be looked over and changed if
> > applicable.
> 
> Installing without any kinds of alterations to the Wine have to be
> _mandatory_ and should be the default option. As far as bug reports -

We will definitely not follow dictations made by you! And the default
installation option will alway the one that leads to the best results.
That's the purpose of this tool.

> I don't imply that any one have to be in #winehq all the time. The
> problem here, is that all users of winetools don't share information in
> any way. Because they are not directed to do so. And most don't know what
> they are doing on Linux anyway. I've seen big numbers of first time Linux
> users that immediately grabbed winetools and installed IE because they
> wanted to have something "familiar" on Linux (btw about 75% of those were
> running as root).
> But then when they wanted to install something more usefull (a game, or
> some office program, they couldn't). No one on #winehq channel uses
> winetools or advertises them. But that channel is the firs place most
> people go for help _now_.

I already admitted that this is a problem and suggested a second mailing
list for WineTools. We have not enough spare time to read channels.

> And just the volume of the users with different problems but all related
> to winetools tells me that something is not right...

I am not reading the channel so I can not prove that but on the list I
don't see that there are massive problems with WineTools. There are for
sure users trying to install unsupported software with WineTools. This
is not covered by WineTools. And they can not, as we all already stated,
be helped by wine-developers. So this is why I suggest an additional
mailing list.

> Also all the how-tos and any other instructions on the www.winehq.org or
> any other place on the Internet written for vanilla Wine and not
> winetools. So if something doesn't work your users are stranded (same as
> they are on windows - no one will help them, because that's the
> environment you've setup).

Many of the tweaks of within WineTools come from the appdb and other
net sources. But again: WineTools allows the installation of supported
software only. We can give a *big* warning on startup that this means
that wine-developers will not be able to help on failure.

> I'm still really want to see this particular link removed from the
> download page and possibly moved to wiki page. This link in such a
> prominent place that every single person things that it's a mandatory for
> running Wine. Especially the way description is worded.

I wonder if there is anyone else on the list who reads the download
page and thinks, WineTools are mandatory. I can definitely not see that.

> I think it's really silly for Wine trying to be the pure replacement of
> windows and yet advertise such a utility that clearly undermines
> development in number of critical areas.

The purpose of WineTools is not to "undermine" and also it is, was and
will never meant to be a "pure replacement of windows". And this is
nowhere stated.

To come to an end with this discussion I would suggest the following:

- adding a list wine-winetools for WineTools users
- adding a warning in the software and on the WineTools site that the
  usage of the software leads to undebuggable situations for
  developers, so no help from there can be expected
- changing the text in the download section according (there is already
  a note stating to use pure wine first)
- smoothly migrating the WineTools to pure Wine with as less as
  possible tweaking

Regards
	Joachim von Thadden
-- 
"Never touch a running system! Never run a touching system?
          Never run a touchy system!!!"