[AppDB] Beef up the Application Rating Guidelines

Francois Gouget fgouget at free.fr
Sat Jan 29 08:00:42 CST 2005


I feel that the current 'Maintainers Ratings System Help' is awfully 
vague and needs to be beefed up. So I'm attaching a proposal in which I 
tried to keep the original spirit but make things more precise.

  * First I'd like to rename this page from
       Maintainers Ratings System Help
    to
       Maintainer's Application Rating Guidelines
    - I added 'Application' to the title because that's 
what is being rated, not the maintainers.
    - I removed 'System' because it does not bring anything.
    - And I changed 'Help' to 'Guidelines' because this page does not 
juse tries to help maintainers give a random rating to an application, 
it tries to define which rating an application can have depending on how 
it runs.
    - Finally once the old ratnig system is removed we can remove 
"Maintainer's" since there will be only one left.

  * I've also reversed the order of the medals, because it seems a more 
logical progression and can simplify the explanations: in order to get a 
Silver medal you must pass all the criterias for a Bronze medal, plus 
some new ones.

  * I still feel there's a huge gap between 'Garbage' and 'Bronze' and 
that it would be interesting to have statistics about the percentage of 
applications that fail to install, and those that install but crash on 
startup, both cases which are included in the Garbage category along 
with those that install and start up but are still not usable.
    (Chocolate and Tin medals?)

I'm attaching the full file as it's much easier to read than a diff. 
I'll send a diff to wine-patches once the final form has been reached. 
For reference the original can be found there:
http://appdb.winehq.org/help/?topic=maintainer_ratings

-- 
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
May your Tongue stick to the Roof of your Mouth with the Force of a Thousand Caramels.
-------------- next part --------------
<!--TITLE: Maintainer's Application Rating Guidelines -->

<h3>Maintainer's Application Rating Guidelines</h3>

<p>
The Application Database lets Maintainers Rate how well an application works
in Wine by giving it a medal. This rating system is designed to help
determine users if the application will be usable for their purposes by
giving them a rating based on an "expert's" opinion.
</p>

<ul>

<li>Garbage</li>
<p>
An application gets this rating if it can not be used for the purpose it was
designed.
</p>
<p>
This includes cases where it does not even install, but also cases where it
installs and runs but crashes too often, or where core functionality is
not usable.
</p>


<li>Bronze</li>
<p>
For an application to get this rating it must be possible to install it by
carefully setting up the Wine environment. Then it must work well enough
for someone to use its core functionality normally.
</p>
<p>
Setting up the Wine environment for this application may require installing
other applications such as DCOM95 or Internet Explorer, or copying a couple
native Windows dlls. It may also require tweaking the Wine configuration,
typically to add dll overrides forcing Wine to use the native dlls installed
by the application or the user, or to force it to not use those. No other
tweaks are allowed.
</p>
<p>
The core functionality of the application must then work correctly. What
constitutes the core functionality depends on the application. For document
oriented applications such as a word processor, this would include loading,
performing basic modifications and saving documents. For network applications
this would include connecting to the server and displaying or saving the
results. But the import / export functionalities or the mail-merge
functionality of a word processor would not be part of the core functionality.
</p>


<li>Silver</li>
<p>
A Silver application is one which requires setting up the Wine environment
just right but which then works perfectly.
</p>
<p>
The rules governing the Wine environment configuration are the same as
those for Bronze applications. However, once installed, all of a Silver
application's functionality must work perfectly.
</p>


<li>Gold</li>
<p>
An application can be rated as Gold if it installs and runs perfectly "out
of the box".
</p>
<p>
This means it must install and work with a freshly created Wine environment
and not require the installation of any other application.
</p>

</ul>


<p>&nbsp;</p>


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