[Fwd: Wine-Wiki.org]

[Francois Gouget]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 tony_lambregts at telusplanet.net wrote:
[...]
> How is that really different than this.
>
> http://appdb.winehq.org/help/?topic=maintainer_ratings
>
> The Maintainer rating system is meant for "supported" applications.

That's the thing. There is no such thing as a 'supported application' in 
Wine, at least the way I understand 'supported':
  * there is no garantee a 'supported' application will continue to work 
in the next version of Wine. That's because Alexandre does not try each 
'supported' application to make sure it still works before making a 
release.

  * there's no Wine hacker to fix a 'supported' application if it breaks. 
Having an application maintainer for each 'supported' application is 
important and a first step towards making sure it will continue to work. 
But it's not sufficient. If it breaks it will need a Wine developer to 
look into it and debug it and I don't see any one proposing to do it 
or able to garantee this.

  * There's no garantee that a Gold application will not regress to 
Silver, Bronze or even lower.

  * And finally I don't see any Wine hacker proposing any specific 
'support' for the 'supported' applications.

So these 'supported' applications are no different from any other 
application and the medals mean nothing more than the old rating system.
They just have 4 levels instead of 6.


> The terms gold and silver are what were already there and are similar 
> to what CodeWeavers uses.

The terms are similar but the AppDB medals provide none of the garantees 
that the CodeWeavers' medals provide.


> If you would like to refine those definitions feel free to 
> submit a patch.

That's the thing with numbers (stars) and medals: it's not clear what 
they mean. It might be clearer to just state:
   Not tested
   Does not install
   Installs
   Starts up
   Usable
   Perfect

As for the maintainer vs. user rating, both should use the same system 
since they are both doing the same thing. It's just that the maintainer 
rating should be given a more prominent place.


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

Yes, I am very thankful for all the work people have been putting in the 
Application Database lately. I think the Application Database is an 
important piece of WineHQ and it's fantastic to see it get some love and 
attention at last.


-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                      Linux: the choice of a GNU generation