> I'm not running > gentoo - but wine isn't a stable product yet and I think you should grip > every stability there where you could get it - shouldn't the winehq site > *recommend* custom compiling? It's all automated so everyone should be > able to do this... I doubt you'll get any extra stability compiling from source, as long so your using the correct binary for your system. Back when everybody compiled, a considerable percentage of the support requests where caused by people compiling without some optional headers, for example the cups headers aren't usually installed, so lots of people said wine didn't print, and we had to tell them to install the cups headers. Wine has a lot of optional libs, cups, ICU, openGL, ssh, artsd, alsa and so on, it's quite a long list, and the fact that now most people use binaries that have support for all these libs saves a lot of time. Also, compiling wine, actually compiling anything, isn't user friendly. Imagine a winxp user that installs linux, then wants to try wine, spends hours getting all the minimal dependencies installed (gcc, make &friends), then he can't print nor play 3d games, and we tell him to go to http://bla and get header X, and then to http://blabla and get header Y, then he gets the wrong version, and starts asking what a header is, and so on. The next day that user will throw his linux CDs away with the remains of the launch. Wine needs usability, wine can now create the .wine directory itself, so, if you want to run an app that works on wine, you just install the RPM in a few seconds (Compiling can take various hours on a old PC), click on the app, and it just works. This means that more users can use wine, without being computer geeks, and that also means more feedback, and consequentially more motivation for developers (If a developer is trying to get a game working, he'll feel more motivated if he knows dozens of people are waiting for that game to work on wine). Also, if something goes wrong when building, it will take lots of learning, and lots of time to fix, if the user is new to these sort of things. And the user may not care about debugging wine, in most cases he want it to install and run quickly and easily. So, for all these reasons, the users that don't want to waste time and want to just try wine and see if/how it works, binaries are the best option. And anybody wanting to do something more advanced (Debugging, cvs regression testing and so on) will build from source, possibly downloading from CVS. Ivan. _______________________________________________ wine-users mailing list wine-users@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-users
