AppDB: Rating / Patching

[Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle at t-systems.com]

Hi,

here are, from an obvious user perspective, my 0.02$ on the issue.

- Platinum: app works "out of the box" -- without changing any
  settings -- *and* as well as on MS-Windows. That means no feature is
  missing: music plays, graphics look similar on both plattforms, the
  perceived speed or responsiveness is similar, ...
(Question: does the need to install thrid party SW like codecs or
Quicktime preclude "platinum" because it's not "out of the box"?)

For anything below platinum, I don't want AppDB to ask users to
compare with MS-Windows. Users either don't care about MS-Windows or
don't have the time to perform a dual installation or don't even have
a MS-Windows machine!
Yet to gain platinum rating, I concede that the additional effort to
test the application's behaviour on MS-Windows is valuable to detect
discrepancies between the two ("hey, I didn't know before that the
application would play background music!").

- Garbage: nobody knows how to make this app work with that version of
  wine.  Don't buy it, you are likely wasting your time & money.

Anything else gets a rating above garbage, no matter how ugly the fix
or patch is.  What counts is that there's a known way to make it work.

- Bronze: the application shows a "promise" that some additional fixes
  and patches may make it work well.


I'm opposed to the idea that a given AppDB version should only
denote an unpatched wine in test results.  Consider how Dan Kegel
recently recommended distributors not to distribute 1.1.12.  E.g. a
hypothetical future Ubuntu package "1.1.12" may contain the official
1.1.12 plus the three patches that Dan Kegel recommends.  Users would
likely not know nor notice.  Typically, distributors add whatever
patches they feel right to the upstream releases.
So it does not seem practical to have the need for a patch prevent
ratings above garbage (or bronze), as some people suggested here.

To me, 1.1.12 plus N patches (N "small") is still 1.1.12 as far as the
AppDB is concerned. However N>0 might preclude platinum, as defined above (except for Ubuntu users).

Similarly, AppDB might prevent Gold or Silver ratings depending on
qualitative aspects of the steps needed to make an app work:
 - need for known distributable third party libraries (e.g. codecs, Quicktime)
   (not provided with the application's installer)
 - complexity of settings (winecfg vs. *.reg vs. environment variable vs. ...)
 - nocd or not copy-protected executables
 - patch to source, requiring compilation of wine
E.g. Recompilation would prevent Gold?

Would you agree that any application in need of a nocd would
necessarily rate one level below another one not "equipped" with copy
protection?

Or does only the result count, and e.g. "Gold" is perfectly describing an
application that works flawlessly "out of the box", except you need to
replace the .exe with the nocd one between install and run? (So far I
have handled it like this, a patch is not enough reason to drop a rating
to garbage, this does not effectively describe the user experience.)

Regards,
	Jörg Höhle