Do we need a forum?

[Steven Edwards]

On Feb 19, 2008 12:43 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> Anybody who thinks we need another forum
> needs his head examined.  There is no shortage
> of Wine forums.  We just need to use the ones that
> already exist.  Adding a new one will just fragment
> the community further.

The whole point of the discussion at wineconf was not adding yet
another non-official sanctioned forum but having one that was blessed
as the official go to place for information about any issue related to
Wine. If we want to bless a list of existing forums it does nothing to
reduce the fragmentation that already exists. My thoughts, as well as
Tom's was that by creating a "blessed" location, all third parties as
well as vendors that develop Wine related products could say "if you
want to discuss using a vendor provided Wine product in a
non-supported manner all are advised to go here and share information"
Right now you have POL, Winedoors, CrossOver, Cedega, Bordeaux, etc
all are Wine forks and addons that have little cross-polination of
user related issues, tips and tweaks. Because Wine does not have all
the spit and polish needed to "just work" out of the box there is a
lot of duplicate work, some done by distribution maintainers, others
done by lone hackers and still others done by Wine companies. As far
as the users or these products go, who do they talk to when they have
an unsupported issue?

Lets say a gentoo user runs Cedega for an unsupported game, maybe it
works in Winehq on Ubuntu but because of the existing forum
fragmentation, where do they look? Winehq appdb? The news group?
wine-users? Ubuntu forums? What about the CodeWeavers user running a
non-supported application on Wine 0.9.foo and he wants to know how to
drop a dll in to his CW install from stock Wine? CodeWeavers should
not support that but Wine having a stable API makes it possible for
the community to support that, provided that vendors package Wine in a
sane manner. I could go on, but I think you should get the idea.

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo