2010/1/19 sacchi antonio antoniosacchi85@gmail.com:
This is a survey for the apps that users would like to see in upcoming version of Ubuntu: what do you think?? ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1381221
They cannot possibly be serious. Photoshop, iTunes, WoW, Steam? "Codeweavers" isn't even an application.
A few comments down on the thread: "I was looking for the button marked "Focus on STABILITY not OMGSHINY!" but it wasn't there." This sums up why I don't like anything that Ubuntu devs decide is the best for their community.
It's been suggested before that wine apps be installable by distro package manager. There's simply no reliable way to make them work this way, because: 1) There's no way to predict what apps work in which specific versions of wine. Even if there was, there's no trivial way to install multiple versions of any package with most/all existing systems (the wine/wine-unstable or wine/wine1.2 distinction is not enough). 2) There's no way to ensure complete removal of the software when the package is removed without a LOT of extra work involving watching the filesystem and registry changes the installer makes. Most Windows app uninstallers leave a "residue" in the registry or filesystem, because those are things created at run-time and not install-time and the uninstaller developers got lazy. 3) AFAIK, there's no way to legally distribute full versions of Photoshop. Photoshop ALWAYS gets mentioned in these sorts of things. The idea is that if an app is difficult to install or get working, the package can do all the extra stuff required to get it working in wine. In fact, the usual argument for Photoshop is some meta-installer package that asks you where your copy of Photoshop installer is (e.g. CD-ROM). IMO, this sort of interactive package meta-installer should be avoided as it makes any sort of automated testing, installation, or package management difficult (the same can be said for running the app's uninstaller when the package is removed). 4) Even if the above issues were addressed, as soon as any package requires that wine be run on installation or uninstallation, a GUI is needed. It would not be possible to uninstall wine apps without a GUI running and accessible. For this reason alone, there should simply not be any packages for any Windows-based app that requires wine to run in any Unix-like distribution. 5) If the packages do a little extra work to get the apps running (e.g. winetricks), then we run the risk of creating a new breed of wine-doors/sidenet/playonlinux scripts that could prove to be impossible to maintain.
www.surveymonkey.com/s/GFVQP62
P.S. Please suggest AutoCAD
Or you could just run AutoCAD in wine to get the same results and not pollute your package management system to do so.