The pros and cons of a wiki AppDB

[Dan Kegel]

There's already an example of an appdb wiki, in a way; see
http://wiki.winehq.org/AdobeApps

I did this because the appdb has ugly URLs for apps,
and I was trying to post links far and wide trying to
draw people in to helping test photoshop and a few
other adobe apps.

If the appdb had nice URLs for apps (and this has
already been prototyped to some extent, but not
deployed), I probably wouldn't have done it.

The appdb has a few other issues (e.g.
threaded discussion is awkward to use,
deleting old comments takes lots of clicking and scrolling,
screen real estate is wasted at the top such that
users have to scroll to get to the good stuff,
the way test results are selected and displayed
is really confusing, etc)
but in general we *need* a structured way to
present the data, because otherwise we'd have
chaos.

So I like the appdb, even with all those faults, and
I'd like to keep it and incrementally improve it rather
than pitch it all and go for the chaos of a wiki.
- Dan