Ubuntu Wiki

I'm Scott Ritchie. You can usually find me on Freenode IRC or the Ubuntu Wine forum as YokoZar. I keep a blog that you should read, which is syndicated on Planet Ubuntu. I also have pages on Launchpad, Wine's Wiki, and Wikipedia. I am a MOTU, and while my chief interest is maintaining the Wine package and everything that is related to it, these days I find myself doing a lot more. View recent uploads in Launchpad.

I want good, usable software everywhere in Ubuntu, especially Wine -- users shouldn't even need to know they're running it. My goal is to help make Wine easy and effective enough to be an official supported package in Ubuntu. Like most developers, however, I make myself useful throughout the entire Ubuntu project, doing everything from filing bugs in other packages to drafting entire blueprints to working on the Sponsorship Queue.

Summary

If you want to get a closer idea of what I'm working on right now, you can check out my microblog and follow me on Twitter/Identi.ca

• Community Developer (MOTU)
• Responsible for all things Wine in Ubuntu

• Moderator of the Ubuntu Wine forum

• I do both design and code
• I love writing - both technical and creative
• When I write code it's either Python or package scripts
• Not just the Wine guy

Interests

• I am working on some Gnome-related packages that will someday be worthy of default install. The goal is to integrate Wine as a seamless part of the desktop. I work upstream a lot at Wine, and while there are a few others interested in usability, I'm the one who has to make the changes needed outside of Wine itself.
• I would also like to improve the Desktop and Gnome in general - the UI design experience I have gained over the past five years in free software will be very helpful for this.
• I am a community developer, and will gladly sponsor any new package or bug fix you have, or even help you get started on packaging.

• I am helping design the user experience for the nascent Glou project so that it will be very easy to play games with your friends, even if you don't yet know which friends or which game.

• I am recruiting modelers and improve the UI of the collection of games for the Spring engine. If you were a fan of the original Total Annihilation, you may be very interested in helping me free the Balanced Annihilation mod by creating models.

Remaining Targets for Karmic and Lucid

• karmic-wine-integration Blueprint!

  • Lucid: see below

• Allow uninstallation of Windows applications through Gnome-App-Install. This way we can put all software removal in one nice, convenient place. This also allows us to eliminate the rather out of place uninstaller in the Applications->Wine menu.

  • Lucid: half done, but need to port the work over to Software Center since gnome-app-install is no longer with us.

• Create a good System->Preferences->Windows Applications menu to replace the relevant parts of Winecfg.

  • Lucid: mostly done, however we're waiting on Wine1.2 for remaining integration tasks, which won't make it into karmic.

• Move Applications->Wine->Browse C:\ Drive to the Places menu and give it a consistent icon

  • Waiting on Nautilus developers: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588733

• Once these three are done, we can remove their counterparts in the Wine menu and collapse it so the user needs fewer clicks to get to their application. So instead of Applications->Wine->Programs->Foo Company->Bar, they could instead just do Applications->Wine->Foo Company->Bar

  • Lucid: waiting on above.

• Get Gnome to display icons embedded into executable files. You put in a CD, and even if you have Wine installed the program has an unhelpful default icon instead of the one it normally does in Windows.

  • Implemented: Not default install yet.

• Create a good right click->properties menu for individual executables. Here the user would be able to modify what windows version they run in, and whether that application should be able to make itself full screen or be forced into a particular window. Currently in order to run Diablo 2 in a window a user has to mess with winecfg or run a cryptic terminal command.

  • Needs further investigation: would like this to be a part of the Wine package rather than Gnome itself.

Plans for Lucid

• App-install-data needs a much better method of storing package details. Software Center will soon hook into the web where uses will edit these details too. From editing app-install-data a lot by hand, one thing that's been clear to me and Michael Vogt is that we need a standard for storing this data inside the packages themselves rather than in a giant mess in app-install-data.
  • - Also needs to support icons of multiple sizes (rather than just one like it does currently) - Would also be useful to have software-center capable of updating this package separately from all others rather than having to go through update manager. How to present this to the user and what timetable to give it should be discussed at UDS.

History of me in Ubuntu

If it's something Wine related in Ubuntu, odds are I'm responsible for getting it done. But, like all Ubuntu developers, I occasionally dabble in other areas that I often forget about. This is a partial list of those things.

Karmic cycle

• Lots of fixes to app-install-data (over 12 bugs in Launchpad and this branch) so that the new Software Center actually has some good information about a lot of important packages. For instance, flashplugin now has a proper description, mentions adobe rather than macromedia, and actually has an icon.

• Clean up the restart notifier in update-manager

• Suggest Tomboy inform the user about search results better

• Create a wine1.2 package with a recent Wine beta and begin merging some of my integration work in
• New icons for Wine1.2 to match the Humanity theme, including various pixel optimizations
• Create a gnome-exe-thumbnailer package to show embedded exe icons inside a generic "application" container
• I packaged the game Kernel Panic and the Spring engine it runs on.

• I created the new branding packages, with work contributed by the community.

Jaunty cycle

• After presenting at wineconf 2008 the Wine developers agreed to create the interface we need for further configuration and integration work.
• Started working on wine integration project, recruited some volunteers to help

Earlier

• Discuss the merit of having a "mute shutdown sound" checkbox when shutting down (if there is one)...or at least having no shutdown sound by default.

• Get community help making a free replacement to the tahoma.ttf font, like what Red Hat did with some other Microsoft fonts here: http://www.alldaycoffee.net/story.php/125

• Amd64BitWinePackage - my attempts at making a 64 bit Wine package that can run 32 bit apps.

• Nano, not vi, needs to be the default text editor for console programs throughout universe. A good example is mutt - a fairly intuitive program, until the user attempts to send an email with it and then gets dumped into a command line vi editor, where I myself couldn't even figure out how to save and quit after about 20 minutes of work. If this isn't the case with some application it is a bug

• Integrate the fancy icons posted to the mailing list by another user earlier (also need to upload a zip file somewhere since the archive is dead). Already using one of them for the Launchpad branding

• Fix shared-mime-info upstream and in Ubuntu so Wine can open .msi files: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/229062

• Upload libtorrent-rasterbar (it's still waiting for debian sponsors, and debian import freeze is soon)

• Include the Wine Gecko in the package somewhere rather than have Wine get it off the internet

How I got to Ubuntu

After some bad experiences attempting to contribute to Debian, I was pleasantly surprised when Jeff Waugh came directly to me and asked me to sign up for Ubuntu. That was back in the Hoary days, and I've been directly helping ever since. In the past, my contributions had mostly been making the Wine packages at winehq.org, however now I do far more. Making Wine work just right for the user involves improving many different parts of the system, and now that I am a MOTU I can work on most of them directly.

WineTeam

Currently, I'm the only active member of the Ubuntu Wine Team. There are about 50 people who have joined the Wine Team by clicking on launchpad, however they haven't provided any actual package improvements. At this point the team is largely unused. After Karmic is released I will remove most members and use the WineTeam PPA as the official means of getting newer Wine betas (currently most users use my APT repository at winehq.org, which was made before PPAs existed).

Other interests

• I taught myself Python for the purpose of conducting my own research into mathematical analysis of different voting systems. I plan to develop this research further and someday head into grad school, where I'll publish results as they come. I even see myself writing a book at some point, albeit that's around 4 years into the future.

• I'm actively searching for work. There's nothing I'd love to do more than work full time on Ubuntu and supporting users at this point. Chasing bounties or being community funded is another option I may pursue, given the massive amount of users Wine has.
• I enjoy reading and writing short essays. Powerful writing is like a clear interface. You stop noticing the words, and instead just get the ideas.

See ScottRitchie/Work for more wikipage

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