May be a bad idea to have Winetools in the next SUSE release

[Tony Lambregts]

Rich Gilson wrote:
> On Thursday 09 March 2006 08:27, Joachim von Thadden wrote:

>> What does that mean? We are making a tool to make Windows programs run
>> with Wine. We do not develop Wine and our main goal is not to achieve as
>> much debugging informations as possible. The goal is to make the usage
>> of Wine as easy as possible for users coming from Windows and who are
>> customized to point and click interfaces. Again: The goal is not to
>> develop Wine. The goal is to use it easy.
>>
>> Regards
>> 	Joachim von Thadden
> 
> Please don't misunderstand me, I have a great deal of respect for what what 
> the Wine developers have accomplished so far; however, I feel that those that 
> have put the effort into Winetools have done so because they saw a need and 
> filled it.  In the realm of ease of use and user-friendliness, Wine is 
> horribly lacking.  Yes, it is getting better, but I think that Winetools is 
> the closest thing I've seen that would make it so that an average user could 
> us it.
> 
> IMHO, the Wine developers should spend less time b*tching about Winetools and 
> more time figuring out how they can 1) build a front-end that is better than 
> Winetools, or 2) help improve Winetools so that it works more to their liking 
> but still offers an easy, user-friendly interface.
> 
> Personally, I would like to see an application (be it Winetools or something 
> else, it doesn't really matter to me) that would interface with the appdb.  
> You could launch this front-end and it would pull up a list of all the 
> applications in the appdb that have special "config" files.  These files 
> would tell this front-end EXACTLY what dll overrides are necessary, what 
> files to run, what needs to be installed beforehand, etc.  Then, if there is 
> ever a change (due to Wine improving support for a particular dll so that an 
> override is no longer needed, for example) all that would have to be done is 
> to update the "config" file attached to the program in the appdb and *bingo*, 
> you've just "update" your front-end!
> 

I think this is a "Good Idea" (tm)

There are always going to be programs that need tweaks to get them to run.

I know of a few that will work fine just by changing the windows version but 
fail miserably with a "clean wine" [1]. These programs usually fail in XP as 
well but it would be nice for the users to have an easy way to get them to run 
"out of the box" in wine

There are others that look for a certain file and if it does not exist the 
program fails[2]. Just creating an empty file with the appropriate name is often 
enough to get the program working. This is a class of bug that is sure to be 
around for a while.

The last class of bugs are the ones that require native (windows) DLL's [3]. It 
would be nice to be able to keep track of these somewhere so that developers 
know which files need to be worked on

Most people are not programmers and even fewer are capable of being developers 
but if we can find a way to make everyones life easier both developers and users 
then we should do it.

In simple terms we get WineTools to query the AppDB with an application name (ie 
somename.exe) and we return a list of applications for the user to choose from 
and the after the user selects the program WineTools gets the appropriate 
overrides from the AppDB and sets them for the user.

I think that that this is do-able if we work together.

--

Tony Lambregts

[1]
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=4349

[2]
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4796
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3661

[3]
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4631