On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 19:36 -0700, Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
It seems there is no end to how far will packagers go to brake Wine by trying to make it better
I thought it's been fixed a long time ago, but it seems not. Wine packages for Debian split important Wine parts into separate packages:
- wine - fonts, few not essential programs, symlinks and _premade_ content of ~/.wine directory (with ~/.wine/c as default c: drive)!!!
- libwine - all the builtin dlls
- wine-utils:(explorer, winecfg, winepath, cmd.exe, iexplore, winedbg)
and many other packages. Also as default it's using "winelauncher" instead of standard "wine" binary. That makes it that much more complicated to troubleshoot any problems that users might have.
So in case anyone having problems with Debian or Debian based distro, please check that all the "*wine*" packages installed. Also is there a way we can request packagers to follow some standard to how they package Wine?
Can we ask packagers to package all parts of Wine into one single package? If they prefer, they can package optional sound drivers separately (arts, esd, jack, nas). Same for documentation, and development headers. However everything else is essential to Wine and most programs that ran under it.
Also can packagers keep default method of starting Wine the same without using any additional scripts for starting Wine?
And of course, if any alterations has been made, state so in the distro specific readme file.
Of course I realize that this is open source and anyone can do whatever they pleased. But please, that's make it more supportable. It's such a huge PITA to waste several hours trying to find the reason why something doesn't work to realize that person doesn't have explorer. Needless to say that lots of things won't work right.
Vitaliy.
This is precisely why I started making the packages myself (that and they were always about 3 months out of date in Debian).
I tried to get my packages put into Debian but after investing about 20 hours of work into it simply gave up. I ran into a huge wall of Debian-orchestrated bureaucracy: the packages are split in this broken way as "policy", I need to file a separate bug report against the package for each application that breaks (and each debian-specific change that does no good), nobody could upload my current version of the package since only the official maintainer can make a non-security fix, and all sorts of other needless headaches.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, accepted my packages with open arms. So now I run and package for Ubuntu, and from what I hear my packages work on Debian.
Really, we should set up a wiki or web page for Debian users telling them the whole story. As you've noticed, it really is annoying troubleshooting this issue when it's so frequently Debian's fault and there's nothing we can do about it other than tell users that Debian is messed up. I'd really hate to have to go back to the days where we told users to compile Wine themselves.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie