An idea for the appdb

[Austin English]

This was discussed a couple months ago, nearly to death. It's a cool
idea, sure, but a ton of work to do, and not really worth the effort.
The data is quickly outdated with new wine versions. Some users may
consider it spyware, developers would find it annoying, and overall,
it would be a big mess.

Read the old thread for more information.

On 2/11/09, alex at centroidcafe.com <alex at centroidcafe.com> wrote:
> 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 uses as well such as "A newer version of the application works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
>
>
>
>


-- 
-Austin