ScottRitchie

Hey, I'm Scott Ritchie. You can usually find me on IRC as YokoZar, both on #ubuntu-devel and #winehackers. [https://launchpad.net/~scottritchie Launchpad link].

I make the wine packages at winehq.org, which usually get synced straight to Ubuntu. I started making them and putting them up at winehq.org after the ones included in Debian (and therefore in universe) became horribly broken and out of date. I've tried becoming the official Debian maintainer, as well as getting him to sponsor my packages, but have been completely unsuccessful and have basically given up on Debian at this point. Debian beaurocracy can be quite frustrating - Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when Jeff Waugh came to me asking me to sign up for Ubuntu

I'm primarily concerned with usability of Wine software, including proper packaging and documentation work. My goal is nothing short of making Wine easy and effective enough to be an official supported package in the next Ubuntu release.

Check these out:

• BetterIntegratedWineSpec - a spec to improve Wine's usability in Ubuntu

• UsefulDisksManagerSpec - a spec to beef up the disks manager applet to include error checking and other features

• EmuleViaWineSpec - a spec to integrate eMule as a regular application in Ubuntu, powered by Wine

• MouseConfigurationSpec - a spec to allow disabling of x11's left+right = middle click feature from the Preferences->Mouse panel

• JabberAccountCreationSpec - a spec to make it very easy to create a Jabber account when first starting Gaim

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

Todo list:

• Integrate the fancy icons at: http://200.181.205.134/wine/

• Get community help in making a full-fledged Ubuntu Windows theme, to use in Wine (when Wine's theming support starts working fully). In the interrim changing the default colors to match the Ubuntu default theme is a partial step, although things will get ugly when a user changes his Ubuntu theme.

  • See http://wiki.winehq.org/ColorScheme and http://wiki.winehq.org/ThemingSupport and http://wiki.winehq.org/IntegrationProjects

    • Send an email to wine-devel asking about the status of some of these...
• Finish and get approved the specs above - a few are Wine related, the rest are general usability things I've thought of.
• Documentation is a seemingly never-ending task.

  • Wine's changed a bit too: double clicking apps should just work, except for this bug in nautilus in edgy: [http://tuzakey.com/~scott/wine-without-mime.png]

• Wine usability changes that need to be done:
  • .msi files need to have an install option that launches "msiexec /i (filename)"
  • Winecfg and the Wine application uninstaller need to be added to Wine's menu by default. We might want to move these in an official package.
  • Winecfg needs a pretty through redesign, as it has some annoying issues (eg tabs referring to other tabs)

  • There also needs to be a "browse virtual windows drive" option that opens the .wine/drive_c/ folder in nautilus (and not Wine explorer)

• The Wine documentation also needs to be moved into the right places. Currently it's in a separate package upstream and isn't even included in the Wine packages in Ubuntu. This is ok, since most people just read the manual from winehq.org, but we'll need to actually integrate the docs properly if we want to support Wine.

• A useful (for Ubuntu) app would be eMule, however compiling it in Winelib so it builds on Ubuntu is a bit hard as it's built in MSVC normally and there currently is no MinGW build. eMule would be a great candidate for inclusion with Feisty + 1 - see EmuleViaWineSpec.

• Still need to convert Wine docs to XML (they're sgml at the moment), which is a blocker for using the scrollkeeper OMF standard and porting to the standard Gnome help format.
• Patch pbuilder to create pbuilder-dapper, pbuilder-edgy, pbuilder-feisty, pbuilder-etch, pbuilder-unstable etc packages that depend on pbuilder and setup the separate chroot environments like the instructions on the wiki page show.

Documentation Status:

• Updating the Wine User Guide itself is largely done.

CategoryHomepage