On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 7:04 AM, Ben Klein shacklein@gmail.com wrote:
Wine cannot afford to hand-hold users too much. Let Codeweavers worry about this for Crossover.
Yes we can afford to hold users hands. In fact, we should be holding users hands.
From a usability standpoint, Linux sucks. Fortunately, it's sucked
for so long most of us can be accepting of it. However, Wine specifically targets a set of users who are transitioning from Windows. The first thing they do when they need to run Microsoft Office is run to Google and type in "Microsoft Office Linux". The choices that come up direct them to try out Wine. So here they are, trying to figure out Linux package management works, trying to download and install Wine, and then they have to do some kind of magic foo like "winetricks msxml6 gdiplus gecko vcrun2005 ie6" that probably makes no sense to them. So, I think we should be helping those users and making things as easy as we can for them. Things should Just Work. But, if something fails, it should fail gracefully and not in some mysterious I-think-it's-broken-but-maybe-not-WTF-is-going-on sort of way. If we can preempt those errors, I think it's a good thing.
Since we tend to never hear from people who agree with ideas, I'll just chime in to say I think this is a good idea. Up to you guys at what level this should be handled, but I do think that Scott and Austin's idea to handle this with a wrapper at the packaging level with just a static list of names solves most of this problem.
-Brian