Winegstreamer entry on Wine FAQ Wiki Page

[Rosanne DiMesio]

On Thu, 7 Apr 2016 12:28:36 -0400
NP-Hardass <NP-Hardass at gentoo.org> wrote:

> The Wine Wiki has 1 place for troubleshooting information, that's that
> FAQ.   

You obviously haven't read much of the wiki.

> The entire "Troubleshooting" section of that page is littered
> with troubleshooting information that is devoid of questions.  

You are correct, many items are not phrased as questions, usually because trying to do so would result in tortured syntax. They do, however, all address issues that have come up frequently for ordinary users on the forum and/or bugzilla. "Verifying winegstreamer support" hasn't.  

> I'm a downstream maintainer, and in bumping Wine, I had to verify that
> the Gstreamer functionality was working.  

The FAQ is aimed at ordinary users. Your needs are obviously quite different. 

> In my experience trying to
> get and verify that Winegstreamer is working, even with
> WINEDEBUG=+gstreamer, Wine will often output ABSOLUTELY nothing
> related to Gstreamer, even when it is running Gstreamer.  Moreover,
> when Wine encounters a lack of Gstreamer plugin, it straight up
> crashes Wine (sometimes just a straight up core dump, I encountered no
> recommendation of plugins, just straight, meaningless coredump),
> meaning people aren't going to say, "I wonder why I seem to be missing
> this Gstreamer plugin..."  They are going to be saying, "Time to file
> a bug report on WineHQ, wine-x.x.x crashes when trying to run app xyz."
> 

Ordinary users faced with a crash and no console output mentioning gstreamer or winegstreamer would never think to look under an item entitled "Verifying winegstreamer support" for a solution to their problem. 

> Let's be clear here, Winegstreamer uses Gstreamer to create DirectShow
> filter graphs, so investigating filter graphs is the most
> straightforward means of identifying if support is working correctly.
> To that end, one can either use the Microsot provided "graphedit.exe"
> which requires installing the Microsoft SDK (which isn't even
> supported, and is extremely heavyweight), or one can install one of
> the third party DirectShow filter graph viewing/editing programs.
> That leaves you with several options, one of the the proprietary,
> nonfree applications, or one of several open source or free
> applications.  

That sounds like information that might be suitable for one of the pages aimed at developers. 


-- 
Rosanne DiMesio
dimesio at earthlink.net