On IRC we started a chat on #WineHQ and discussed how to improve Wine. There were comments made and I wanted to summarize them and ask for your opinion. By the way: Who is in charge of WineHQ, AppDB etc.? A list of people who are responsible for that would be nice (it could be I've missed that one though).
Back onto the main topic. Remarks made: 1. AppDB needs a revamp. Maybe drop the maintainers (those things just need to be set by developers only). Just have a look at the activity of all the maintainers in the last year. **Read on for suggestions to drop the AppDB.
2. Create a Wine forum. This solves the problem of users asking the same questions over and over again. Here also the "comments" of the AppDB could be centralized (because most of them aren't really comments)
3. With a forum in place, the user-mailing list could be dropped and maybe also even the devel-mailing list.
4. Create a Wine Wiki, instead of the AppDB. Only certain developers (or maybe users) can set/edit certain pages. Then also howto's could be inserted here.
5. It's too difficult for users to add a bugreport. Either create a small program/app which does it for the user (like "Submit this bugreport" *click*) and you're done. The other option is to create a simplified method for searching and inserting a bug report, because from a users view, there are too many options. (and probably the user wouldn't even know what to click on. Don't forget to give the users the option to 'add' a file with certain 'debug channels' (which ones? only +seh?)
6. Users need to know that if they submit a bug report (when it's simplified) that it actually HELPS you, the developers. So it's "Help us, help you".
What's your opinion about this? In my eyes, it would greatly improve the user input/feedback and would even make Wine more popular.
Regards,
SWAT