Winetricks game verbs - good or bad? (was: Re: New winetricks 20110117-alpha: new verbs dxdiag, firefox4, ut3, hegemonygold_demo, ...)

[Dan Kegel]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 7:33 PM, Vitaliy Margolen
<wine-devel at kievinfo.com> wrote:
> On 01/17/2011 11:30 AM, Dan Kegel wrote:
>> New version 20110117-alpha adds the following new verbs:
>>
>> firefox4 - beta9 of Firefox's new web browser
>> ut3 - the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 3 (requires dvd)
>
> Isn't that exactly why we marked all other scripts like this a "third party
> unsupported tools"?

I suspect PlayOnLinux got the cold shoulder because they
use old versions of wine, they use their own patches,
they don't have a 'real' version control system for game scripts, and
they didn't communicate with the wine community.
So problem reports from PlayOnLinux users weren't very
helpful for Wine developers.

Winetricks doesn't encourage users to run old or patched wine,
and I'm not a stranger on wine-devel.

In fact, if we play our cards right, winetricks might actually
reduce the number of clueless support requests.
People have trouble following the HOWTOs in the appdb.
A winetricks verb for a game should be like a perfectly
automated little implementation of the HOWTO, with
bug workarounds clearly marked, and skipped automatically
when using new enough wine.  Better still, since it's
automated, we can run it nightly to make sure it doesn't break.

What concrete problems do you see with winetricks having
verbs for popular games?
- Dan