appdb needs to list 0.9.47 in the pulldown, please

[Chris Morgan]

On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 5:05 PM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Chris Morgan <chmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  >  It seems reasonable to me to include the version bundled with gutsy,
>  >  >  even if it's getting old, because gutsy is so popular.
>  >
>  >  If we wait another 18 days can we ask users of gutsy to upgrade to hardy? ;-)
>
>  Of course.
>
>
>  >   If we ask users to put the wine ubuntu repository in their
>  >  sources.list file won't that let them continue to keep up with newer
>  >  releases without much difficulty?
>
>  All of your suggestions are along the lines "change the user's behavior"
>  rather than "adapt winehq to the user's behavior".  While all your
>  suggestions are fine, they don't change the fact that users are
>  misbehaving because the appdb doesn't allow reports with Gutsy's
>  version of wine.

I'm all for adapting our behavior to better fit with the behavior of
our users. I've spent hundreds of hours working on improving the
appdb.

If there was a good reason stated to accept results for obsoleted
versions then I'd agree with you. In the future I can see a need to
pin certain versions to the available versions list, certainly 1.0
seems like a pretty obvious version to pin to the list for a period of
time.

There are several issues with keeping older test results. We run the
risk of confusing users by showing ratings for Wine releases so old
that the current behavior doesn't match. We can hide these older
versions but why accept them for submission then? If we show them then
we need to consider how to present the ratings so users of newer
versions don't get confused with older versions that come with some
distributions.

By accepting results for older versions we may not be making the user
fully aware that their version is considered to be old.

It's a complex issue that deserves more discussion and may require
more php and ui work to present properly to the user.


>  This problem will keep happening with future releases of Ubuntu
>  if we cut off the version of wine too early, as we do now.
>

I'm a fan of ubuntu, run it on all of my machines etc but that doesn't
automatically mean that test results for older versions are useful. We
are rapidly approaching a 1.0 release and each incremental release has
a wide range of improvements. A user of Gutsy may find it useful to
see test results for 0.9.47 but its likely even more useful for us to
help them upgrade to a version we support, currently the latest
incremental release.


>
>  >  If we don't plan on releasing new versions based on the release in
>  >  gutsy, 0.9.47, then I think we've got to consider that version to be
>  >  obsolete and unsupported.
>
>  By your logic, we should not allow any reports against anything
>  but the latest version of wine.
>

The reason I kept the last several entries on the list was because
some people tend to lag behind in their wine versions. Its
understandable for us to have a window of versions so we can get
reasonably current test results, even if not the most recent test
results. Already the list contains a handful of previous releases,
several months of obsolete versions.


>
>  >  I agree, we can't always choose the kind of data we get. It's up to us
>  >  to decide which test results to keep and which ones to discard.
>
>  Whatever.  I'm tired of discussing this with you.  If the appdb maintainers
>  agree with me, they'll make the change.  I don't enough to keep arguing.
>  - Dan
>

I'm not opposed to a patch that re-adds 0.9.47 version to the list but
I'd like to see a patch that adds a table to keep pinned versions and
php code to manage this list.

Chris