An idea for the appdb

[Luke Benstead]

2009/2/11 Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>:
> 2009/2/11 Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com>:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I was thinking earlier it would be quite nice if when I double clicked
>> a Windows app in GNOME it would display a nice dialog saying something
>> like "This Windows application may not run correctly as it is
>> currently rated Silver. Please report any bugs to the Wine project.
>> Continue | Cancel". Obviously this kind of functionality is not a job
>> for Wine, but for the distro. Still, it got me thinking how this kind
>> of functionality might be achieved.
>
> There's been quite a bit of discussion along these lines recently.
> Unfortunately, AppDB simply isn't reliable enough for this type of
> dependence. With any luck, that will change when the recently
> discussed redesign of test data submissions is set up, but it'd still
> take a long time for sensible data to become reasonably usable.
>
>> My idea is that the appdb should allow for people to associate a list
>> of checksums with an application version. For example, WoW might have
>> the checksum for the setup program and the game's executable,
>> associated with the appdb entry. The other extension to the appdb
>> would be to allow a way to programmatically retrieve information on an
>> application's rating etc. by going to a certain address (e.g.
>> http://appdb.winehq.org/getAppInfoFromChecksum.php?checksum=ac2b3f5928cba...)
>> which would return the info in XML or some other format.
>
> You've clearly put quite some thought into this, which is highly
> commendable. However, I would personally be against such a move, as it
> would put a lot of extra load on AppDB (in terms of network
> bandwidth). I'm also not too keen about something that retrieves data
> from the net every time you run an app. It's too easy for people to
> mistake it for spyware.

Hmm.. I see your point. However would it really use that much
bandwidth? I mean, any sane implementation of the functionality I
described would only display the dialog the first time that
application was used. Retrieving a tiny xml file is surely less
bandwidth than browsing the appdb for the application (granted it will
happen more often than people browsing the site but I still don't
think it's masses of bandwidth). I can also see what you mean about
spyware, but other apps retrieve stuff from the web if there is a
connection (CDDB, and album covers are two examples).

> Another problem with a system like this is that ratings change
> depending not only on application version (which you've addressed) but
> also on Wine version. Platinum apps could become Garbage for one
> version (and yes, it has happened). Since AppDB test results tend to
> be few and far between on version numbers, it's not really useful for
> an automated "how well will this work?" system. It would have to
> calculate some sort of "best fit" (which will certainly be completely
> wrong on occasion), or just ignore the missing data.
>
> And finally, just like with the other suggestions for using the AppDB
> data elsewhere, this system does not take patches into account. Some
> apps require patches that completely break others (the Worms
> Armageddon ddraw hack and CoD hack come to mind here). Unfortunately,
> there's no sensible way to account for patched Wine in this sort of
> automated system.
>
> It is not a bad idea to give the user some sort of feedback on how
> well they should expect their app to run, but unfortunately it's
> virtually impossible to account for every possibility (patches and
> broken wineprefixes being the biggest problems).
>

You're right, it's a shame the data can't be more frequent and
reliable, I just thought it would be nice to be able to probe the
appdb for this information easily. :)

Luke.