[Fwd: Wine-Wiki.org]

[tony_lambregts at telusplanet.net]

Francois Gouget wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Jonathan Ernst wrote:
> [...]
> 
>> "Rating with Windows" mean rating when using a real windows partition.
>> This rating might have good reasons to be here in the past (when most
>> apps needed many native dlls) but is now regarded as a bad feature by
>> some of AppDB hackers. Maybe some other readers here can say what they
>> think about the removal of this feature ?
> 
> 
> I agree that now the 'Rating with Windows' option is not really useful 
> any more. One of the reasons is that the result is going to be 
> completely different if the Windows is Windows 98 than if it's Windows XP.
>

The "With Windows" day is gone. We _will_ get rid of it. It is a bad thing since 
running wine with a real Windows system can be dangerous to the real Windows setup.

> So the 'Rating without Windows' should become the only rating. But I 
> like the 0 to 5 rating:
>   0 -- Unrated.
>   1 -- Does not work.
>        Totally nonfunctional. Crashes on load.
>   2 -- Partial functionality.
>        Good enough for a carefully scripted demo.
>   3 -- Limited functionality.
>        Sufficient functionality for noncritical work. Occasional crashes
>        okay, as are weird setup problems, required patches, or missing
>        major functionality. Alpha quality.
>   4 -- Usable.
>        Substantially correct. Good enough for general use, with possible
>        caveats.
>   5 -- Perfect.
>        No flaws under any mode.
> 
> The medal system seems redundant and much less precise.

How is that really different than this.

http://appdb.winehq.org/help/?topic=maintainer_ratings

The Maintainer rating system is meant for "supported" applications. The terms 
gold and silver are what were already there and are similar to what CodeWeavers 
uses. If you would like to refine those definitions feel free to submit a patch.

> 
> Maybe representing this as stars is not the best way to convey the 
> nuances above. Maybe it's the label that needs changing to better convey 
> the 'How well does it work?' meaning. Maybe 'Works:  80%' would be 
> clearer than 'Rating: 4'. Can we have a tooltip popup (e.g. using an alt 
> property?) when the user moves the mouse over the rating? What about 
> making the rating a link to the section that explains what it means?
> (the documentation was a bit hard to find, probably because I expected 
> 'Documentation' to point to Wine's documentation)
> 
> Maybe text is the best, just use the labels above plus a color code.
> 
> 

The "star" rating system definately needs to be revamped. It is on the TODO 
list. however it serves as a different purpose than the Maintainer ratings since 
it is for regular users. We should/will revamp the documentation for it at the 
same time.

These discussions are important feedback to improving the AppDB, so thank you 
for your thoughts.

--

Tony Lambregts