Please read: Wine(HQ) needs a reorganization (AppDB, Bugzilla, etc.)

[James Hawkins]

On 1/9/06, S. Schauenburg <s.schauenburg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Back onto the main topic. Remarks made:
> 1. AppDB needs a revamp. Maybe drop the maintainers (those things just
> need to be set by developers only). Just have a look at the activity
> of all the maintainers in the last year. **Read on for suggestions to
> drop the AppDB.
>

What is the point of dropping maintainers?  Activity is always
appreciated, but for most apps it doesn't take much.  It either works
out of the box, or the status doesn't really change much over the
releases.  Simply putting up a HOWTO is the most some maintainers need
to do for an app.  The maintainer doesn't need to report back to the
appdb every release to say no regressions have occurred.

> 2. Create a Wine forum. This solves the problem of users asking the
> same questions over and over again. Here also the "comments" of the
> AppDB could be centralized (because most of them aren't really
> comments)
>

The AppDB comments need to stay where they are.  Each comment is
specific to a particular app and only shows up on that app's page.  We
already have wine-users, bugzilla, and the appdb for users to
communicate about wine.  Adding a forum would spread ourselves too
thin.

> 3. With a forum in place, the user-mailing list could be dropped and
> maybe also even the devel-mailing list.
>

hehe that'll never happen.

> 4. Create a Wine Wiki, instead of the AppDB. Only certain developers
> (or maybe users) can set/edit certain pages. Then also howto's could
> be inserted here.
>

wiki.winehq.org

> 5. It's too difficult for users to add a bugreport. Either create a
> small program/app which does it for the user (like "Submit this
> bugreport" *click*) and you're done. The other option is to create a
> simplified method for searching and inserting a bug report, because
> from a users view, there are too many options. (and probably the user
> wouldn't even know what to click on. Don't forget to give the users
> the option to 'add' a file with certain 'debug channels' (which ones?
> only +seh?)
>

I don't see how a program would make submitting bugs easier.  I'm
guessing you're thinking about a crash reporter, which would report a
bug with the crash info/backtrace etc, but that would just flood the
bugzilla with duplicate crash-only bugs.  I'm curious as to what
user's find hard about submitting bug reports.  If you know, please
post the issues here.

> 6. Users need to know that if they submit a bug report (when it's
> simplified) that it actually HELPS you, the developers. So it's "Help
> us, help you".
>

I agree.

--
James Hawkins