[Wine] I need to make some comment on WineTools

[Joachim von Thadden]

Am Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 02:34:29PM -0800 schrieb Philip V. Neves:
> I just red the article on the website about winetools.  This is 
> controversy is a non starter in my oppinion. I believe that something 
> like winetools should be included in the wine distribution to begin 
> with.  It should be something under the control of the developers 
> themselves and bug reports should be added to fix any problems. Why did 
> it take someone outside of the wine development team to do this. For the 
> average user we don't want to have to make a gazillion changes in 
> winecfg. You guys are always adding new features or making changes. I 
> want to just get something going not get stopped at the door by a huge 
> barrier to entry.

Hello,

there has already been a comment by the developers but I want to make
one too, as I am the maintainer of WineTools.

As you have read, the purpose of WineTools is to make
installing as many apps as possible as easy as possible. This is very
hard to achieve as Sven Paschukat and me have not the time to maintain
dlloverrides for every single application supported by WineTools. So we
use a single big configuration for almost all applications. And we use
many builtin DLLs from the installation of IE6. This leads to the
problem that a failure with WineTools is not debuggable by the Wine
developers. Sven and me are trying to help as good as possible if
someone has problems with WineTools.

And we are trying to change the WineTools configuration to use only
builtin dlls for as many apps as possible. So if you are happy with the
apps WineTools supports and have a valid license of >=Win98 then just go
with that. If you are trying to install a not supported app and have
success, mail me and I will include the app in the next WineTools
release. If you have problems with an app and we can not help you, then
you can try it with plain Wine and in case of failure get support from
the Wine developers.

I think WineTools will never be included into Wine itself because of the
heavy changes it makes to the Wine standard configuration to achieve its
goal, unless such changes are not needed any more. And also then it is
questionable whether it makes sense, because WineTools is then only a
simple downloader/installer and not more. If Wine gets to run most apps
out of the box you might take any share-/freeware installer and just do
the same.

> Furthermore.... IE is a necessary part of windows now. Functionality for 
> it needs to be in wine. Its not something that can be disgarded or 
> ignored. Allot of applications use IEs DLL's and functionality these 
> days. So its intrinsically part of the windows API.  You won't get 100% 
> compatibility without the functionality it offers.

The Wine-Developers are programming very hard to make embedded IE6
calls usable by Open Source replacements like mozilla control. If this
is done there will be no need to install IE6 under Wine. Note that this
is a *very* important goal, because otherwise you always have to have a
valid Windows license. And Wine is trying hard to get around that!

Regards
	Joachim von Thadden
-- 
"Never touch a running system! Never run a touching system?
          Never run a touchy system!!!"