Rich Gilson wrote:
On Thursday 09 March 2006 08:27, Joachim von Thadden wrote:
What does that mean? We are making a tool to make Windows programs run
with Wine. We do not develop Wine and our main goal is not to achieve as
much debugging informations as possible. The goal is to make the usage
of Wine as easy as possible for users coming from Windows and who are
customized to point and click interfaces. Again: The goal is not to
develop Wine. The goal is to use it easy.
Regards
Joachim von Thadden
Please don't misunderstand me, I have a great deal of respect for what what
the Wine developers have accomplished so far; however, I feel that those that
have put the effort into Winetools have done so because they saw a need and
filled it. In the realm of ease of use and user-friendliness, Wine is
horribly lacking. Yes, it is getting better, but I think that Winetools is
the closest thing I've seen that would make it so that an average user could
us it.
IMHO, the Wine developers should spend less time b*tching about Winetools and
more time figuring out how they can 1) build a front-end that is better than
Winetools, or 2) help improve Winetools so that it works more to their liking
but still offers an easy, user-friendly interface.
Personally, I would like to see an application (be it Winetools or something
else, it doesn't really matter to me) that would interface with the appdb.
You could launch this front-end and it would pull up a list of all the
applications in the appdb that have special "config" files. These files
would tell this front-end EXACTLY what dll overrides are necessary, what
files to run, what needs to be installed beforehand, etc. Then, if there is
ever a change (due to Wine improving support for a particular dll so that an
override is no longer needed, for example) all that would have to be done is
to update the "config" file attached to the program in the appdb and *bingo*,
you've just "update" your front-end!
I think this is a "Good Idea" (tm)
There are always going to be programs that need tweaks to get them to run.
I know of a few that will work fine just by changing the windows version but
fail miserably with a "clean wine" [1]. These programs usually fail in XP as
well but it would be nice for the users to have an easy way to get them to run
"out of the box" in wine
There are others that look for a certain file and if it does not exist the
program fails[2]. Just creating an empty file with the appropriate name is often
enough to get the program working. This is a class of bug that is sure to be
around for a while.
The last class of bugs are the ones that require native (windows) DLL's [3]. It
would be nice to be able to keep track of these somewhere so that developers
know which files need to be worked on
Most people are not programmers and even fewer are capable of being developers
but if we can find a way to make everyones life easier both developers and users
then we should do it.
In simple terms we get WineTools to query the AppDB with an application name (ie
somename.exe) and we return a list of applications for the user to choose from
and the after the user selects the program WineTools gets the appropriate
overrides from the AppDB and sets them for the user.
I think that that this is do-able if we work together.
--
Tony Lambregts
[1]
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=4349
[2]
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4796
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3661
[3]
http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4631
