An idea for the appdb

[alex at centroidcafe.com]

Sorry .. forgot to reply all.
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:08:47 +0200, Gert van den Berg
<wine-devel at mohag.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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).
>>
> Wine transmitting every application I run to someone else would be
> rather worrying...
>
> It should rather be opt-in. Such as "Wine has detected that it is the
> first time you run this application, do you want to check AppDb for
> more information (Yes/No/Ask again/Never ask for any application)" It
> must be easy to disable globally as well...  It might have some other
> uses as well such as "A newer version of the application works
> better", etc.
>
> I might be handy to allow automatic submission of test data to AppDb
> (which IMHO might be more useful than just retrieving...), which
> should automatically include the Wine executables' checksums +
> version, distro info (if accessible from lsb-release, parts of the
> uname output & kernel checksum, which might be used to detect the
> distro), kernel version, cpu architecture, X server name and version,
> graphics driver name and version, DLL overrides, etc. This might help
> modified wine versions and the level of tweaks to be detected by AppDb
> automatically. (There should be a very specific opt-in process for
> this data's submission though, such as letting the user manually
> upload a file with this data and fully disclosing the file's contents)
> This kind of data can be handy for bug reports as well.
>
Automatic submission of test data could be a very handy tool. Scenario:
User A tries to run an application, it crashes due to bugs in Wine. User A
elects to submit data. Sometime in the future, User B tries to run the same
application under a similar configuration. It crashes also, but User B
being a sly user figures out what DLL overrides, patches, etc. allow this
app to progress past the original crash point. Wine detects this and
collects the information. Now when User C tries to run this app, Wine
displays a message like: "This application has been known to fail under the
current configuration. However, workarounds have been discovered that may
yield greater success. <link to AppDB>"

That would be pretty sweet, no?

-Alex Corrado