[Bug 24497] Adding distributions is far too easy

[wine-bugs at winehq.org]

https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24497

--- Comment #5 from Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net> ---
The problem is not that it's too easy to add distributions; the problem is a
combination of bug 27378 and some design decisions that make user errors
likely.

Bug 27378 was the reason for the distributions being added without test
reports. Back then, if the maintainer or admin corrected the distro, the test
report was corrected, but the distro was added to the database anyway, without
any test reports attached. Something changed that in the past 7 years, and now
the test reports are added with the incorrect distro information, along with
the distro being added to the database. To my mind that's worse, because now
the admin has to move the test data to another distro before the invalid or
duplicate one can be deleted. I have a fix for the latter, but so far haven't
figured out how to solve the original problem reported in that bug.

As to design decisions, the first problem is the word distribution itself.
That's a Linuxism that makes no sense for other operating systems, and many new
Linux users don't understand what it means either. One of the most common
errors I see is adding the name of a distributor to the distribution field. 

The page layout exacerbates the problem: the box to add a distro is at the
bottom of the page, separated by several other fields from the dropdown list.
It's not obvious the two are connected, and to a user who doesn't understand
what a distribution is in the first place, the text boxes at the bottom are
just another field to fill out. It's quite possible that some of these errors
have been from users who selected a distro from the list and added something at
the bottom: the AppDB will favor the contents of the textboxes over selections
from the dropdown list. 

Changing the terminology from distribution to operating system would help some;
 that's the easiest part. Making the AppDB favor the dropdown list over the
textboxes would also help, but is harder to accomplish (supposedly that problem
was fixed back in 2006 by commit b587dbfd172172ff992ef84b7c3e923c29504e71). 

The final thing that would make some difference is simply allowing the various
*buntu flavors to have their own listings instead of insisting they all be
listed under Ubuntu. There are differences between the flavors that could
affect Wine, and we're actually very inconsistent in that policy: Linux Mint is
based on Ubuntu, but we allow them a separate listing.

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