Website Polishment and Docs

[cookiengineer]

Hello @Cybolic,

we currently had somebody pushing vineyard to archlinux's AUR as it was still using the 1.4.1 branch before from launchpad. Link to /r/archlinux thread

What are the official distribution channels for vineyard?

Currently it's a bit unclear, as every link on the interwebz (also from the vineyardproject website) points to an outdated launchpad repo, where the issues are not maintained anymore since 1.5 testing (around 2011-2012).

It would be awesome if vineyard could get more traction as I really like this project. If you need help building a polished website, I would love to help you :)

Also, what are your plans for the project? Do you need maintainer help or do you have not enough time to maintain it anymore? What about a vineyard organization on github, so that everything is in one place and people can start helping you?

Cheers from Germany,
~Cookie

[Cybolic]

Thanks for the notification!

The official distribution channels are indeed here on GitHub as well as the testing repo on Launchpad (which pulls from GitHub).
I've updated the website now to correctly link to GitHub and also added a link to the AUR package; thanks for reminding me!

The website is just WordPress, so if you know or can provide a better theme, by all means, feel free to suggest one. The current one is rather old and as you might have guessed, I unfortunately don't have the time to build a new one these days.

Honestly, I don't have many specific plans for Vineyard. I still use the project for personal use, but my attempts to get a discussion going concerning new features or area that require focus, haven't produced much, so these days I just add whatever I need and fix whatever bugs I find.

Your idea about an organisation on GitHub is interesting and not something I'd considered; I'm all ears :)

Thanks for reaching out!

Cheers,
Christian

[cookiengineer]

Awesome!

Well, I personally think that vineyard is pretty amazing compared to what wine offers (UI wise and user-experience wise). The only thing that I personally have in mind for improvements is something like an "package archive for winecfgs" because most of the time it's redundancy work and could be shared in a centralized archive or even a github repo that shares configs of apps and games that are known to work.

A github orga would have the benefit that other people can chime in and work on the website (github.io?) if you have no time working on it; and it would be more transparent what you want to work on feature-wise or what needs to be fixed.

Currently it's a bit hard to get started with vineyard from the user perspective, so I would also offer some build servers to have more packaged builds for direct downloads and the instant it-works effect.

I currently prefer building most of my stuff on travis-ci.org - it's free for open source, and has github integration. So we could host the website and automatically build the github releases via travis so we have no manual overhead ;)

The only thing I'm not sure about is testing as I'm not confident enough in python to give a meaningful perspective there.

But I think a simple statically generated website on github.io with some direct downloads and some nice screenshots (and maybe a video to show off what's awesome) would really benefit the project.

I'm not sure what you need from wordpress featurewise? I think an option would be using markdown syntax and just use the github editor for that :D

Let me know whatcha think of those ideas.

[Cybolic]

Concerning the "package archive", PlayOnLinux already has a huge collection of those, so I'm not sure it's the right direction to try and compete with that. Vineyard already auto-detects and works with PlayOnLinux configurations/prefixes and Wine versions and integrates with winetricks for installation of basic packages, which I honestly think is fine. Better integration with winetricks would probably be a good idea though, as the current support is a bit minimal.

Launchpad already offers build servers, but yes, they are only for Ubuntu. I haven't looked into other build services, so if you know something that would fit and offer similar functionality, I'd be interested.
Travis-ci.org is great, but as Vineyard currently doesn't have any tests (which is something I'd love to fix, but I'm afraid I'm just as much in the dark with that part of Python), I don't see it bringing much value right now.
What did you have in mind for builds apart from the current .debs?

A static website on github.io is not a bad idea. I rarely post news updates anymore and we have Twitter for that sort of thing these days, so I agree that WordPress isn't bringing much to the table right now.
Good feedback :)

[Cybolic]

I've set up an organisation now and invited you to it. Thanks for giving me the push to start actually making Vineyard a proper community project :)

[cookiengineer]

Awesome!

I didn't know about the winetricks and playonlinux integration. That's actually quite nice. Maybe we should try to have something like a scraping functionality then to get or maybe port the profiles from playonlinux? just took a look at winetricks; nothing changed from last I fixed stuff for it... still a single mega giant shell script :D

PlayOnLinux meanwhile is quite good and well organized, their stuff is all in this repo: https://github.com/PlayOnLinux/Scripts

They seem to be using some weird kind of JS engine; it's not node-based and something else where they have new Wine()... API bindings... so we probably can't easily reuse it :D (example file)

Blind guess would be that they use Rhino or so, because they have JS bindings for the java VM there. But I think that looks more like totally overengineered stuff rather than a simple installer :D

Regarding the package builds: I would try to build some packages for Arch (as a binary pkg), Debian, SUSE, redhat and Ubuntu. So that most people or newcomers can just choose their distro and have the download ready (or alternatively select the ppa instructions way with a lil' how-to guide).

For some of my other projects I tend to use the release section on github for that, as github has a sweet API for uploading binaries via curl <3 so it's quite easy to implement from the deployment side of things. Just a few lines of bash code do the trick example publish.sh if you use github tokens for that.

[Cybolic]

There was actually a lengthy email discussion a few years back with the project leaders of winetricks, PlayOnLinux, WineDoors and a few others, where we discussed creating a common installation script format. We never quite agreed on a spec, but we closed in on something close to what winetricks uses - a shell script with preloaded custom functions for doing common installation procedures (I mention it in case it should ever be resurrected).
I just took a look at the PlayOnLinux scripts, and as much as I love Node.js and JS, I really don't like the approach taken, so that's not something I want to support. A converter script might be possible, but again, I feel it's a bit outside of what Vineyard should be (I feel Vineyard is more of a general tool and less of an installer front-end, to put it bluntly). If we can manage somehow to build a standard for installation (maybe based around python-wine), then I'm open to the idea, but I'm not convinced it's worth it when PlayOnLinux already does it quite well.

Ah yes, RPM packages, of course. It's not something I've looking into, but you're right, more installation packages would definitely help. How is Flatpak these days?

I haven't made a proper release in forever, but yes, the next one should go on GitHub, I agree :)

[bendem]

Just letting you know that the site is pretty broken right now.

[Cybolic]

Thanks for the heads-up! It's "fixed" now.