An idea for the appdb

[Gert van den Berg]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:24 PM, Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can also see what you mean about
> spyware, but other apps retrieve stuff from the web if there is a
> connection (CDDB, and album covers are two examples).
>
Wine transmitting every application I run to someone else would be
rather worrying...

It should rather be opt-in. Such as "Wine has detected that it is the
first time you run this application, do you want to check AppDb for
more information (Yes/No/Ask again/Never ask for any application)" It
must be easy to disable globally as well...  It might have some other
uses as well such as "A newer version of the application works
better", etc.

I might be handy to allow automatic submission of test data to AppDb
(which IMHO might be more useful than just retrieving...), which
should automatically include the Wine executables' checksums +
version, distro info (if accessible from lsb-release, parts of the
uname output & kernel checksum, which might be used to detect the
distro), kernel version, cpu architecture, X server name and version,
graphics driver name and version, DLL overrides, etc. This might help
modified wine versions and the level of tweaks to be detected by AppDb
automatically. (There should be a very specific opt-in process for
this data's submission though, such as letting the user manually
upload a file with this data and fully disclosing the file's contents)
This kind of data can be handy for bug reports as well.

Gert