The manual lamented the lack of feedback, so I thought I'd give you some. 1.1.1 says "It tries to target both the new Wine user, by offering a step by step approach, and the experienced Wine user, by offering the reference material mentioned above."
Ordinarily, I would expect the novice stuff, followed by reference material. But, judging from the table of contents, this isn't what you've done. It would be good to say how the stuff is arranged.
Assuming the novice and expert stuff is interspersed, it might be better to separate them. Yes, I realize that's probably a lot of work. That's why this is only a though :)
You might also want to put a date and version number on the documentation; at least on Debian, looking at the html, I don't see it. I'm using wine-doc 0.0.20040716-1.3.
Thanks for your work on wine.
Please don't use the official Debian packages, they are rather out of date. Instead, please use the winehq.org .deb files (I'll upload instructions on how to get them by tomorrow), or compile from CVS. The documentation is also currently undergoing a rewrite - you can see its status as of the latest release on the winehq.org web page. Currently, only the introduction of the user guide is in its updated state - I'm working on patching up the Getting Wine chapter as well as some other stuff like the bug reporting guide.
Thank you for your input though, Scott Ritchie, Self Proclaimed Wine Usability guy
On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 13:06 -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
The manual lamented the lack of feedback, so I thought I'd give you some. 1.1.1 says "It tries to target both the new Wine user, by offering a step by step approach, and the experienced Wine user, by offering the reference material mentioned above."
Ordinarily, I would expect the novice stuff, followed by reference material. But, judging from the table of contents, this isn't what you've done. It would be good to say how the stuff is arranged.
Assuming the novice and expert stuff is interspersed, it might be better to separate them. Yes, I realize that's probably a lot of work. That's why this is only a though :)
You might also want to put a date and version number on the documentation; at least on Debian, looking at the html, I don't see it. I'm using wine-doc 0.0.20040716-1.3.
Thanks for your work on wine.
On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 17:02:01 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
Scott Ritchie, Self Proclaimed Wine Usability guy
Good. We need one. I do my best but these days spend most of my time writing app compat patches. Somebody who is specifically devoted to usability can only be a good thing.
Does it involve writing usability patches though?
On Wed, 2004-12-08 at 01:23 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 17:02:01 -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
Scott Ritchie, Self Proclaimed Wine Usability guy
Good. We need one. I do my best but these days spend most of my time writing app compat patches. Somebody who is specifically devoted to usability can only be a good thing.
Does it involve writing usability patches though?
Well, patches to the code not so much. My knowledge of wine internals isn't that hot, and frankly there's so much documentation and packaging work to do that we're probably better off if I just yell at people in IRC and email on code issues while I build packages and documentation. For example: please get winecfg working quickly :)
I'm really excited about where AppDB is headed. With the new maintainer interface being finalized and the upcoming bug reporting documentation I'm making, nailing down exact problems should be a lot easier for you coding boys. One of the biggest developer complaints, that bug reports are little more than "my application doesn't work!" should soon dry up.
I really do think we're on the verge of something truly groundbreaking. With things like the proposed desktop integration, the easier configuration programs, the possibility of winelib program packaging, and, dare I say it, a stable release version, wine may become one of the greatest and most important free software projects ever.
This might sound like a lofty goal, but I believe it is very obtainable. So, I may as well say what I'm thinking: Within six months I believe it will be easier to install free windows software on Linux than in Windows. I believe I will be able to teach my mother how to have Ubuntu download and run a winelib compiled app in a few minutes. I believe that within a year wine will become so usable that The Economist will mention it in a story about how Linux is taking over Windows market share, even on the home desktop. And, finally, I believe that Microsoft will be worried that Wine can provide greater backward compatibility than Windows itself before they release Longhorn, so much so that they feel obligated to mention it in their SEC filings.
Great work everyone, Scott Ritchie
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Mike Hearn -
Ross Boylan -
Scott Ritchie