AppDB: Rating / Patching

[Darragh Bailey]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:09:52PM +0100, Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Paul TBBle Hampson wrote:
> [...]
> > > If you don't need to manually install the third-party library on a stock 
> > > installation of the application's officially supported Windows platform 
> > > (e.g. Wow on Windows XP), then you should not need to manually install 
> > > it in Wine. If you do, then that application cannot be rated platinum.
> > 
> > True, but not the point I'm talking about.
> 
> Strange. It seemed spot on to me and I have not seen anything that would 
> make me think otherwise so far.
> 
> 
> > On a stock install of Windows XP, you'd have to go get the runtimes and
> > install them, same as under a stock Wine prefix.
> 
> Are you sure? It's quite possible that some Windows component (IE 7, 
> Messenger, a service pack, etc) installs these runtimes so that you 
> would not see this issue on Windows XP (or Vista). If so the Warcraft 3 
> maintainer is correct and the application cannot be rated platinum.
> 
> So maybe rather than 'stock Windows installation' I should say an 'up to 
> date Windows installation with no third party software'.

Warcraft III and Frozen Throne expansion was released to support Windows 
98/ME/2k/XP. Nowhere in it's patch notes does it say that the minimum
requirements to run Warcraft 3 have changed to have the minimum
requirements of Windows 2k & XP only. Since to my knowledge the Visual
Studio 2008 (I believe that is 7, right?), doesn't have an runtimes for 
Windows 98 or ME.

Basically to me the game developer dropped the ball, they shouldn't have
compiled the patch contents in such a way that a) required a
distributable that is not supported on all of the platforms they
originally released a product for or b) failed to include the necessary
runtimes when using any Visual Studio product.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."