ScottRitchie

Hey, I'm Scott Ritchie. You can usually find me on IRC as YokoZar, both on #ubuntu-devel and #winehackers.

Check these out: BetterIntegratedWineSpec UsefulDisksManagerSpec EmuleViaWineSpec MouseConfigurationSpec

I'm currently trying to be a MOTU in order to properly support my Wine packages. 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putting them up at winehq.org after the ones included in Debian (and therefore in universe) became horribly broken and out of date.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. Debian beaurocracy can be quite frustrating - Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when Jeff Waugh came to me asking me to sign up

The specific packages I'm concerned with at the moment are those related to Wine. When I finish porting open source windows software by recompiling natively with Winelib, such as Miranda, I'd like to package it for Ubuntu as well. I've been putting quite a bit of work into them, as well, and would love to spend more time on it in an official context.

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 package in the next Ubuntu release. My current todo list looks like this:

• Documentation is a seemingly never-ending task, both for man pages and packaging guidelines and such.
• The Wine documentation also needs to be moved into the right places. I was recently given a very helpful tip on IRC about making Wine's User Guide work with standard freedesktop.org help interfaces, and I'll be committing the patch upstream shortly.
• Tweaking the wine package to get it a bit more right is also important. I've got a bunch of little changes I need to make for the next release written up on my penboard at the moment. Hopefully soon I can start erasing them.

• Updating the Wine web site to make things easier (example is this page: [http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb] ). That site may undergo a slight redesign in the future too.

• I've got a special project I've been trying for a while involving porting Miranda Instant Messenger with Winelib. In theory, I could convert it into an Ubuntu package that runs on all arches with the Wine package installed, even though Miranda is a windows program. If this becomes easy it represents an amazingly huge step in application compatibility - it won't be long before we start seeing other OSS apps like DC++ or FileZilla coming into Ubuntu packages. Writing a howto guide for this based on my experience is part of this goal.

  • A more useful (for Ubuntu) app would be eMule, however compiling it is a bit harder as it's built in MSVC normally and there currently is no MinGW build. eMule would be a great candidate for inclusion with Edgy - see EmuleViaWineSpec.

• The Winelib documentation needs updating as well. I plan on using my experience trying to port eMule/Miranda to help it out.

Documentation Status:

• Updating the Wine User Guide itself is largely done.
  • Still need to convert to XML, which is a blocker for the scrollkeeper OMF standard and porting to the standard Gnome help format.

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