Ubuntu survey

[Ben Klein]

2010/1/19 sacchi antonio <antoniosacchi85 at gmail.com>:
> This is a survey for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming
> version of Ubuntu:
> what do you think??
> ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1381221

They cannot possibly be serious. Photoshop, iTunes, WoW, Steam?
"Codeweavers" isn't even an application.

A few comments down on the thread: "I was looking for the button
marked "Focus on STABILITY not OMGSHINY!" but it wasn't there." This
sums up why I don't like anything that Ubuntu devs decide is the best
for their community.

It's been suggested before that wine apps be installable by distro
package manager. There's simply no reliable way to make them work this
way, because:
1) There's no way to predict what apps work in which specific versions
of wine. Even if there was, there's no trivial way to install multiple
versions of any package with most/all existing systems (the
wine/wine-unstable or wine/wine1.2 distinction is not enough).
2) There's no way to ensure complete removal of the software when the
package is removed without a LOT of extra work involving watching the
filesystem and registry changes the installer makes. Most Windows app
uninstallers leave a "residue" in the registry or filesystem, because
those are things created at run-time and not install-time and the
uninstaller developers got lazy.
3) AFAIK, there's no way to legally distribute full versions of
Photoshop. Photoshop ALWAYS gets mentioned in these sorts of things.
The idea is that if an app is difficult to install or get working, the
package can do all the extra stuff required to get it working in wine.
In fact, the usual argument for Photoshop is some meta-installer
package that asks you where your copy of Photoshop installer is (e.g.
CD-ROM). IMO, this sort of interactive package meta-installer should
be avoided as it makes any sort of automated testing, installation, or
package management difficult (the same can be said for running the
app's uninstaller when the package is removed).
4) Even if the above issues were addressed, as soon as any package
requires that wine be run on installation or uninstallation, a GUI is
needed. It would not be possible to uninstall wine apps without a GUI
running and accessible. For this reason alone, there should simply not
be any packages for any Windows-based app that requires wine to run in
any Unix-like distribution.
5) If the packages do a little extra work to get the apps running
(e.g. winetricks), then we run the risk of creating a new breed of
wine-doors/sidenet/playonlinux scripts that could prove to be
impossible to maintain.

> www.surveymonkey.com/s/GFVQP62
>
> P.S. Please suggest AutoCAD

Or you could just run AutoCAD in wine to get the same results and not
pollute your package management system to do so.