appdb rating inflation

[Vitaliy Margolen]

Dan Kegel wrote:
> Ratings can be quite useful for helping people find good apps;
> a gold rating should imply
> "doesn't need a HOWTO because it pretty much just works".
> 
> Any app that needs a HOWTO is probably running into wine bugs of some sort.

You keep forgetting that unlike windows Linux has lots and lots of
things that you can configure. Doesn't meant you have to, but you can.
This negates any assertions about running as-is.

Unless we lock Wine into one particular version of one particular distro
with requirement of "not touching anything" then what you described as
"platinum rating" might be obtainable.

But until we, and the whole Linux world, value freedom of choice, we
have to widen all our ratings to include HOWTO as not just possible, but
strongly suggested way of making application X work. However I would
agree that we need to limit extent of the changes, suggested by HOWTO as
"allowed" under platinum and gold ratings.

For example should be allowed under all ratings:
- Changing sound driver
- Disabling openGL/D3D extension (because of buggy application/driver)
- Changing windows version
- Installing freely available software (that does not require windows)
- Altering configuration / settings of an application (as long as this
does not compromise quality / operation / features) (in winamp changing
from dsound to winmm).
- Updating application with publicly available upgrade or patch (does
not include any ... "questionable" patches).

But things like should not be allowed in platinum:
- Native dlls
- Extra Wine patches (that are not in the tree or were rejected)
- Non-standard means of installation (copy cd content to HDD, using ISO
images, copying from somewhere).

Besides, every program comes with readme, and some do not work as-is
even on windows.


Vitaliy.