An idea for the appdb

[Tim Schwartz]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:58 AM,  <wine-devel-request at winehq.org> wrote:
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> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:57:48 +1100
> From: Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: An idea for the appdb
> To: Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com>
> Cc: Wine Devel <wine-devel at winehq.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <d7e40be30902110457t3d84c396ibfd264aead12d6e9 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
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> 2009/2/11 Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/2/11 Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com>:
>>> 2009/2/11 Luke Benstead <kazade at gmail.com>:
>>>> My idea is that the appdb should allow for people to associate a list
>>>> of checksums with an application version. For example, WoW might have
>>>> the checksum for the setup program and the game's executable,
>>>> associated with the appdb entry. The other extension to the appdb
>>>> would be to allow a way to programmatically retrieve information on an
>>>> application's rating etc. by going to a certain address (e.g.
>>>> http://appdb.winehq.org/getAppInfoFromChecksum.php?checksum=ac2b3f5928cba...)
>>>> which would return the info in XML or some other format.
>>>
>>> You've clearly put quite some thought into this, which is highly
>>> commendable. However, I would personally be against such a move, as it
>>> would put a lot of extra load on AppDB (in terms of network
>>> bandwidth). I'm also not too keen about something that retrieves data
>>> from the net every time you run an app. It's too easy for people to
>>> mistake it for spyware.
>>
>> Hmm.. I see your point. However would it really use that much
>> bandwidth? I mean, any sane implementation of the functionality I
>> described would only display the dialog the first time that
>> application was used. Retrieving a tiny xml file is surely less
>> bandwidth than browsing the appdb for the application (granted it will
>> happen more often than people browsing the site but I still don't
>> think it's masses of bandwidth). 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).
>
> A request to AppDB would be at least once per user, application
> version and Wine version combination. Given the number of people using
> Wine, this would almost certainly be a massive load increase on AppDB,
> it would repeat roughly every 2 weeks (when new releases come out),
> and possibly even bring AppDB down as a worst-case scenario.


What about packaging the latest appdb information with each release?

Tim Schwartz
Sanity Internet
tim at sanityinternet.com