Wineconf follow up: Wine Usage Data Collection

[James McKenzie]

Austin English wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 5:02 PM, James Hawkins <truiken at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> Very true. Where it would help is with knowing what apps people are
>>> running. Many people might try Wine, and never get it to work, then
>>> give up without filing a bug. Conversely, some people might have it
>>> work perfectly fine, but since it works great, we never see bugs
>>> filed. By collecting these statistics, we'll be able to know what apps
>>> to focus on, which will give a bit better direction on which bugs to
>>> fix, which features to implement, etc.
>>>
>>>       
>> That's some pretty strange logic.  If most people are running app X,
>> but we don't know about it because it runs really well so we don't get
>> a lot of bug reports for it, then why would we want to *focus* on that
>> app?  We should be focusing on apps that don't work, or have lots of
>> bugs.  We already have this information from the thousands of bug
>> reports in bugzilla.
>>
>> --
>> James Hawkins
>>
>>     
>
> It would give us an idea of what apps to focus on when/if moving
> toward graphical/app based regression testing, as well as what apps to
> focus on improving performance in.
>
> Though, obviously those aren't high priorities, focusing on broken
> apps should be. Like I said, however, some people may get fed up and
> not bother to file bugs. I know often times in other programs, I don't
> file bugs, instead, I find a way around it or switch programs. Some
> others, like VLC, I try to report, but never am able to since they
> won't confirm I'm not a robot... /end rant
>
>   
In this day and age where collection of data is becoming suspect, I
would seriously doubt the need to collect this data, especially on an
opt-in only basis.  It would prove to be worthless.  The thing is that
we should and could continue to fix problems as they arise and continue
to advise users to provide input through Bugzilla.  Speaking of
Bugzilla, there is one area that needs a massive amount of work to make
it more user-friendly.  If I had the time....

James McKenzie