An idea for the appdb

[alex at centroidcafe.com]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:03:21 -0700 (GMT-07:00), James Mckenzie
<jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>>Automatic submission of test data could be a very handy tool.
>>
> This would be great, but as previously discussed, who would maintain this
> information
> and verify it is correct and proper?  Although some features would be
> 'neet to have'
> it is best to leave them on the drawing board for now and work on the
> various bugs
> that require workarounds.  This is because of two limited resources: 
> People and Time.
> If you have the skills to implement this feature, go ahead and try on a
> limited database
> on your home system.  You would quickly see that we have about 10,000
> applications
> in the AppDB and there are many versions of Wine.

Ten thousand records in a database is not very significant. My day job is
DBA, so I might have the skills to tackle something like this (at least in
part).

> This gives you some
> starting point
> of the size of this task.  Supporting a few applications would lead to
the
> 'why isn't
> my wiz-bang application there' and a great deal of discussion, wasting
> more resources.
> 
> Of course, if you could produce something that would emulate the "Report
> to ...."
> functionality that is in popular use, that would help keep the AppDB and
> Bugzilla
> up to date as long as a search capability were added to sweep these
> systems for
> pre-existing entries related to the current problem.
> 

This was what I was thinking. Microsoft does this in Windows, and they are
the reference implementation of the Wine API. If collecting this data helps
M$ debug Windows, then I would think it would certainly help Wine too.

> Just my opinion, but this project is not worth attempting at this point.
> 

If that is the consensus, then I won't bother looking into this further.
However, it seems like there is currently a movement to rework AppDB
anyway, so why not consider this idea now, so it could be factored into
those plans?

-Alex