AppDB, ratings and native vs. builtin trouble

[Alexey Loukianov]

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Good day to all subscribers of this list,

I've got a small decision trouble I have to deal with as an AppDB maintainer.
I know that years ago there had been discussion on this topic, but I want to
bring this once on a surface once again so we would get a fresh modern look an
thus minor problem.

As we all know, Wine isn't perfect, thus applications often require native
DLLs to behave properly. AppDb treats such cases as being "Gold" rating. It's
easy to distinguish between "Platinum" and "Gold" case most of the time, but
sometimes there are cases where native dll overrides happen automagically as a
result of app installed installing third-party lib redists himself.

Good example is idSoftware's Rage game which require XAudio2 to functions -
which is not implemented in Wine. User would have to install and use native
lib for game to function, but most of the times it would be done automatically
by Steam (its "auto-install required libs" feature would try to install
DirectX redist at the first time user would try to launch the game). How
should we treat situations like that? From user PoV it's "Platinum" - app is
working out of the box. From real side of things - it is "Gold", as native dll
override is required for app to function - Wine's stubbed xaudio2
implementation is obviously not enough for game to work.

With the recent release of Diablo III we're are at the same spot: game
installer auto-installs vcrun2008 redist as a part of installation process, so
end-user experience is like this game "works out of a box". Problem is that D3
installed isn't working unless user patches Wine's AcceptEx implementation
with Erichs patchset, so for vast majority of Wine's userbase installing D3
would be something like "copy already installed D3 from other PC" - and that
would bring the problem of the game requiring native VC++ 2008 runtime on the
surface.
How should we treat/assign ratings for these cases?

P.S. Aside from that, I want to once again bring up the discussion on
extending AppDB so more detailed test reports would be possible. IMO it might
be reasonable to add to AppDB test report form is an ability to specify
whether the version used was "vanilla" or "patched with some out-of-tree
patches" one. For most reporters sane default would be "vanilla", while at
some circumstances most of the test reports would come for "patched" version:
good examples are SW:KOTR, WoT, D3 and many other games that require
out-of-tree patches to function best under Wine.

Thanks for spending your time reading this, and thanks in advance for your
answers.

- -- 
Best regards,
Alexey Loukianov                          mailto:mooroon2 at mail.ru
System Engineer,                            Mob.:+7(926)218-1320
*nix Specialist

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